Tag : Mahabharata

New Delhi : The soul of Peter Brook's work as a director, actor and writer was in his productions noted for what he called "colour-rich", as opposed to "colour-blind", casting. In his view, when the audience sits bored, listening to a recital of words with no emotion, the actor has failed. Brook once said: "People have entrusted themselves to you for two hours or more and you have to give them a respect that derives from confidence in what you are doing. At the end of an evening, you may have encouraged what is crude, violent or destructive in them. Or you can help them. By that I mean that an audience can be touched, entranced or -- best of all -- moved to a silence that vibrates round the theatre." And this, literally, brought the roof down on the opening night of William Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens' at the once-dilapidated Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris that he helped restore. The applause shook the building. "There were various problems on the opening night. It was a big success but the applause brought down some of the ceiling. People had bits of plaster on their heads," Brook said in an interview to Chris Wiegand, Stage Editor of 'The Guardian' newspaper in 2016. How did the turnaround happen? "I wanted that Elizabethan feeling where if you come to the theatre, you mix with all people -- not just the rich. We had people sitting on the ground from the start. Actors were in close contact with the audience, reacting immediately with them. The acting space was much further forward than it had been when it was a proscenium theatre. So we had this proximity with the audience but there was also this great, vast space reaching to the back wall -- that was important to depict Timon after his exile." Brook explained. "We put i ...