the suit (d peter brook)

A lull. A lull which goes with the process of creation as well as the fact that whilst the play is on I tend to find myself going to the cinema less. In truth I missed writing about Cold Souls, which I saw in Cinemateca and quite enjoyed, but I was up to my neck in Harper and somehow didn't have the headspace.

London offers more headspace. In large part because it's less creative. For me, obviously. Anyway. Back in town scarcely 48 hours, I saw that it was possible to get a £10 ticket for the Brook. I sort of feel that there's an obligation to go and see the Brook. Because I have missed so many previous opportunities. Yet, as with the last play of his I saw, whilst The Suit is charming and astutely directed, it feels like this is late Brook, Brook-lite. The play is a fable from the townships of Apartheid South Africa. There is a sprinkling of politics, but not enough to either offend or engage, some lovely songs, a certain amount of ingenious if unspectacular stagecraft and some pleasant, relaxed acting. There is nothing to dislike, but nothing to get too excited about. There seems very little sense of risk. Perhaps Brook was always a more conservative director than his sense of formal innovation suggested. Marat/ Sade and US were as much a reflection of their time (and perhaps Marowitz, who knows) as his own sensibility. What he brought was the elegance and, at the time, visionary stagecraft. This might sound off, given that The Suit is set in one of the most overtly political environments of Brook's and indeed my own lifetime. There are references to the abuses of the school system and the poverty. But in the end this seems incidental. The director's mission is to charm, to woo international houses, as no doubt the play will do. The South African context feels like colour (as, say, a white box is colour); in spite of the supposedly tragic end to the fable, the audience leaves in a feelgood mode.

I enjoyed The Suit, but I feel I enjoyed it more than I needed to. I would have liked to have enjoyed it less, and felt more. 

marat/ sade [d peter brook; w peter weiss, adrian mitchell)

This is a film of a stage play. The play takes place in a single room. It is not inherently cinematic. Watching it offers a partial, exacavatory experience of one of the most significant European theatre productions of the last century. Far from a satisfying experience, it is nevertheless compelling, and offers a fascinating insight into the career of Brook himself, the fate of British theatre, and the destiny of theatre per se. And if theatre be a mirror to the times, then it tells us a great deal about the way our society has evolved in the past fifty years.

Firstly, the play itself, is a minor masterpiece. Whilst it's well known that it deals with the French revolution, notably the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday, and it's also well known that the play is an enactment staged by the Marquis de Sade within the madhouse of Charenton, what is perhaps less well known is that it's set fifteen years or so after the events of the play have taken place, during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. As such, Weiss not only creates a play within a play, but the temporal shift allows him to play with varying perspectives on the violence that the revolution generated. In 1964, when Brook staged the play, the issue of the role of violence as a tool to transform society was still one that could at least be contemplated; not least in a world where colonialism was still an oppressive force. Whilst we know that the French revolution was the cause of bloodshed, war and suffering, it was also the mechanism by which, in theory at least, France began the process of transformation into its modern state.

Theatre directors might have their philosophical streak, but they are also, by inclination, showmen. Brook takes the implicit agendas of Weiss' play and creates a vivid, non-stop carnival of theatricality. The stage is littered with the bodies of madmen and women who at any given moment might choose to lay their claim to dramatic attention. The film perhaps does not do full justice to the latent anarchy, save for the explosive final scene, (reminiscent of the end of that other great radical sixties work, Zabriskie Point), when chaos is allowed to reign. Brook's showmanship, and the rigourous brilliance of his cast, honed as a group within the RSC over the course of various productions, offers Weiss' intellectualism all the flesh and blood it needs to confront the audience with the consequences of the issues the script addresses; the limits of libertarianism, the inevitability of governmental constraint, the madness that underpins utopia. Whilst Marat/ Sade is perhaps conceived as something of a hymn to European radicalism, it would be easy to present the counter case, that Weiss and Brook are arguing for the importance of societal control over our more anarchic instincts which lead towards violence. Violence will always have a part to play in the ordering of society, and the question then becomes one of how that violence is managed. A Foucaultian thesis which is strengthened by the fact that De Sade's reference to the savage execution of a prisoner in Royalist pre-revolution France sounds identical to the example used by Foucault at the opening of Discipline and Punish.

Whatever the politico-philosophical arguments, what's clear is that at this point in its history, as it backed its greatest director, the RSC was an organisation prepared to engage with a kind of daring, neo-intellectual theatre, one that sought to examine and comment on its times. In retrospect, it might be seen to be the high point of its existence as a cultural body. It's not entirely the RSC's fault that it has subsequently become something of a factory, producing work which is primarily there to keep the tourists happy as they pitch up at Stratford for their dose of Shakespeare. It's more a reflection of the way British society has evolved, a country trading on its past in order to earn a living in the future, an attitude that is inherently conservative. Within this context, the notion of theatre being a medium for examining the philosophical framework of the culture/ society still survives, but within carefully demarcated zones. The madness has been placed under control, allowed to parade itself from time to time, but on the whole a policy of stability is pursued, in a bid to minimise risk and ensure steady if unspectacular returns.

C.I.C.T. (d. peter brook)

I recently had a go at reading Moonlight, Pinter's last play. It had its moments, but I couldn't engage with it. There's something strange about the last work of those who might be genii. The ghost of what has gone before, allied to the constant desire to convey. I also wondered if art isn't, to some extent, age specific. Things that appeal in youth perhaps pall in middle age. If this logic is valid, then those works aimed at old age are the ones least likely to be understood, both because the elderly remain marginalised within our culture, but also because old age still seems so distant to this writer, even if it's not as distant as it once was. To phrase a truism.

Brook's new play, the first of his I've seen, deals with Colonialism and its attitudes, faith, and, to a certain extent, the meaning of life. Although many of the all male cast are youthful, at the heart is the notion of the legacy or inheritance a prophet leaves behind.

The stagecraft has the light touch one would expect from the master of the empty space. Yet, it's also obvious that imaginative gestures which were breathtaking thirty or forty years ago, have now become commonplace. The simplicity that Brook unearthed has become integrated into a mainstream, if not always at the level of the big budget theatres, certainly within any T.I.E. show, or international touring piece. The likes of Cheek by Jowl, Goold, Meckler to name but a few, have all taken on board Brook's ability to play with realism and space, creating an alternative theatrical universe, and what was once new is no longer.

The play itself explored both the notions of faith and French colonialism in early 20th century West Africa. The seeds of key conflicts of today are apparent within the text as it probes a localised, pre-emptive clash between mystical Islam and Western values. The audience at the Barbican seemed only barely engaged. All of us had come to pay homage; listening to the play's words was a secondary exercise. Some of the dialogues about the nature of faith and the meaning of life became abstract, and hard to follow. More than one punter dozed.

At the end, the actors left the stage. The lone musician, surrounded by his tools, let the music still. The audience sat in silence. No one knew if there was another trick up the director's sleeve, or if this silence was all that remained. The silence held. No one knew what to do. The uncertainty contained a kind of magic. It's the simplest of devices but all the same, after treading water for an hour and a half, suddenly we were in at the deep end, having to take responsibility.

The applause, when it arrived, was fulsome.