Peter Brook, interculturality and women

I am reading lately all these books on Brook, the famous English modernist director, and I am still puzzled by his idea of interculturality. Peter Brook’s well-known focus of intercultural theatre was dealing with East/West connections, mainly by using Asian performance elements and Indian or African narratives for his Paris-based theatre. The intercultural fantasy that he was involved with was very tricky. Gabrielle Griffin said it mildly: it “leaves intact a geopolitical imaginary that distinguishes, in a seemingly unproblematized way, between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between an ‘other’ and a ‘self’”. But on the other hand, what brings in, like in the case of Peter Brook's production of Mahabharatha, was emphasized by the actress Mallika Sarabhai which relates her acting experience in Mahabharatha to feminism:
"The turning point came with Peter Brook’s international version of the Mahabharatha where I played Draupadi. At that time a new wave of feminism was gripping the mind of the younger generation in the west. And for the first time young women were looking into feminist thought and ideology.[...] I had women of different backgrounds, black mamas from Harlem, sophisticated Sorbonne graduates, aboriginal women from the Australian outbacks—coming up to me and saying ‘why don’t we have role models like Draupadi today? She makes sense to us.’ One evening in the Paris Metro two slinkily dressed women came up to me and said, ‘we have stayed away from the feminist movement, things like “bra burning”. But today, after seeing your performance, we feel that is the kind of woman we want to be.’ I came out of the Mahabharata tour with a new perspective toward my art. I felt that if the role of one woman affected women across cultures then my advocacy and my performance had to marry."
Mahabharatha is even today probably one of the most contested Brook productions for his colonial appropriation and decontextualization of one of the most significant Indian texts. His official biographer, Michael Kustow, accused “the chorus of politically correct academics and cultural theorist attacking Brook” of demagogy, because they are not able to see the universalism of Brook’s mise-en-scene and his view on Mahabharata as one work that “carries echoes for all mankind” and is “of the greatness of the works of Shakespeare.” Even by this defense, I can clearly sense the Western standard to which the performance is referred to.
Another problematic episode in Peter Brook’s career as director is the way he depoliticized some powerful plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Far Away in a 2002 performance. David Hare, the British playwright, accused Brook of “draining plays of any specific meaning or context to a point where which became the same play – a universal hippie babbling which represents nothing but fright of commitment.” Brook responded by saying that he no longer believes in ”the value of debates, pamphlets, statements and pseudo-Brechtian speeches.” His theatrical direction for last decades is in search of something “more to life that the rational mind can grasp” with a strong influence of the spiritualist Gjurdieff’s ideas, a highly problematic approach in my opinion, by removing any social context and critical awareness for a “one-size-fits-all mysticism”. This is an important tool in maintaining and pushing a conservative view on theatre, by maintaining an oppressive idea of a forgotten tradition, none other that the colonialist privilege of a misogynist white male that conquers and exploits the feminized “oriental wisdom” (as Brook was talking on several times about his wife). In an Oedipian game, the non-Western culture becomes for Brook object of desire and exchange, a woman that can offer satisfaction as long as she becomes “maternal and domestic” (Brook talking again about his wife).

photo via flickr

Peter Brook's Salome

In 1949, Brook was the director of productions at the Opera House, Covent Garden. From this privileged position, he started to work on Richard Strauss' Salome, with Oscar Wilde's libretto. He picked as stage designer a controversial figure at that time, Salvador Dali. Brook went to Spain not to work with Dali on a set, but on a "hallucinatory fantasy".

Before the production opening, Brook was writing: "Strauss' music is the hallucination-producing drug which induces the same emotional reaction as the highly stylised, artificial, rhetorical and elaborate visual imagery of Wilde's original... The task of the producer and designer is to find the same approach in "theatre style" which Wilde supplies in his dialogue."

Brook connected to Dali plagiaristically, he returned to London with an amazing portfolio. He remembers awkwardly Gala running after him to get a receipt for it. He did not understand why was she afraid of plagiarism or unauthorised sales. I guess seeing them working together was enough to understand the hysterical identification of Brook with Dali's ideas.

But the story is not over: on his way back, Brook experienced what his biographer, Michael Kustow, calls "an encounter that might have figured in a Dali nightmare." Brook was held and robbed in a forest by what the English press called "Spanish bandits" (some underground Republican militias), armed with rifles, machine guns and grenades. They took the car and all their belongings. Brook asked them if he can keep Dali's drawings in exchange of his silk pyjamas. The bandits tied everyone up and threw the designs at Brook's feet.

"I was as close to death a young life being extinguished as one could think - I know that I was terrified. But ten minutes later, I was only aware of the comic side of it" remembers Brook. His identification with Dali's work went so further that it denied the materiality of his own life, the only material connection to reality was given by the Salome drawings.

But the real attack came in London, where critics were unmerciful with Salome: one of them, Ernest Newman, wrote "Of the production in general, it is difficult to speak in the restrained language appropriate to a Sunday paper. One absurdity followed fast on the heels of another..."

Brook wrote an answer to his virulent critics containing "The critics all decided that Dali and I were only out to annoy them. There, at least, I might claim that they underestimated us; if that have been our intention I think that between us we might have done much worse..." This "us" reminds me a lot of Freud-Fliess connection and the long letters about another "us".

The first result was that Brook lost his job, his contract as Director of Productions at Covent Garden was not renewed in 1950. Musical Opinion's comment is remarkable: "his meteoric rise to such an exalted post at the age of twenty-seven was an artistic mistake on the part of authorities who should have had more respect for tradition than to permit it to be the plaything of a young experimentalist. "