Open Circle: Peter Brook's Theatre Environments - Hardcover

What quality of space can foster the 'rising to another level' which is the ultimate aim of theatre? How can one overcome the obstacles - cultural, spatial, material, technical - which impede the sharing of experience which is the unique prerogative of performance? Peter Brook has consciously engaged these questions since turning his back on conventional theatre buildings in the late 1960s. This book tells the story of the journey of exploration into the fundamental character of theatre space he has undertaken with his collaborators over the last thirty years. Following an initial three-year experiment which took place in African villages, Persian tombs and Western city streets rather than theatre buildings, Brook chanced upon an abandoned music hall in a tough part of Paris in 1974, a building which miraculously conformed to his desire for a space at once rough and dignified, free and precisely balanced. The Bouffes du Nord theatre has since been the seed-bed for his group’s work, fostering some of the last half-century's most important dramatic creations - from The Mahabharata and The Conference of the Birds to The Man Who and The Tragedy of Hamlet. All of these works have toured the world, and Brook's group has found itself caught up in a quest to find an equivalent to the Bouffes' ideal conditions in the wildly diverse circumstances of other theatres - some dilapidated like the Bouffes, some deadly modern boxes - quarries, factories and monasteries. The Open Circle analyses the spaces created for particular productions, and documents them with an unprecedentedly rich range of photographs and drawings. Peter Brook gives a full account of his own ideas and inspirations; Andrew Todd and Jean-Guy Lecat shape the narrative as it is seen from inside Brook's group, and from the outside - as a unique and vitally important architectural oeuvre, the concrete legacy of Brook's work.

Andrew Todd was born in 1968. He studied English literature at Cambridge and architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. An architect, writer and musician, he lives in Paris, where he worked for the French architect Jean Nouvel prior to setting up his own practice. He was for five years a correspondent for the Italian review Spazio e Società; he has taught and lectured at universities and architecture schools in the United States, Norway, France, Italy and England. He leads an international consortium generating new solutions for ephemeral theatre spaces.