Peter Brook Essay -- essays research papers fc

It is noted in many books that near the get off of his career, Peter patronize was attracted to twain plays and techniques that expressed human contradiction. He much wondered, though, whether there were any modern playwrights who could possibly equal the richness and complexity of Shakespearean verse, and often complained about the improbability of ever finding physical to work on or to produce as stimulating as that of Shakespeare. When, in 1964, set up received a play entitled The Persecution and character assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de de Sade (Marat/Sade), by German playwright Peter Weiss, it is also noted that Brook felt he had finally encountered the challenge of Shakespearean theater he was looking for. Not only was Marat/Sade an incredibly well create verbally and unique approach to theater as a whole, its internalization of practice of medicine and movement, song and montage, and naturalism and surrealism within the text created the perfect passage, for Brook, from his commercial olden to his experimental present, as well as a way for both the playwright and the director to deal with the concept of theater as therapy a rather ironic, up to now at the same sequence clever, idea seeing as how the play itself is conducted within the confines of an asylum, with the inmates themselves as the stars. One of the nigh complex aspects of presenting Marat/Sade was its large and eclectic degenerate of characters and also its incorporation of a play within a play. On stage, these points were, looking at the opinions of a majority of both the auditory modalitys and the critics, presented successfully by Brook and the cast he worked with. From the prison guards who loomed in the background, clothed in butcher aprons and arm with clubs, to the half-naked Marat, slouched in a tub and covered in wet rags, evermore scratching and writing, to the small group of singers, dressed and painted up as clowns, to the narcoleptic but murderous Charlotte Corday, Weiss and Brook offered a stage toil that both engaged and amazed the audience, while at the same time forced them to irresolution their role as the audience no burst exemplified than at the very end of the play, where the inmates, standing minatoryly at the parade of the stage, actually begin to applaud the very people who applaud their performance, exacerbating and confusing some, but forcing most t... ...m, though they are quite safe and sound behind a large facade of iron bars. This technique corresponds to the menacing way that the characters address the camera throughout the performance, and creates the necessary feeling, for the viewers, that no much(prenominal) barrier is available to protect them as they are drawn in uncomfortably closer to the inmates by Brooks camerawork. We begin to question whether or not the soliloquies, spoken directly into the camera instead of to the def end aristocrats who originally played our part of the audience, are still merely plainly a theater convention, or if the insanity of the performers is used as a catalyst for we, ourselves, to feel threatened directly by what is spoken. We also begin to question whether or not the inmate is even looking at the camera to address the audience, or is simply insane, and addressing the air around them, adding yet another layer to such complex characters. Creating such questions within the audiences mind also seems to create, for most, the aura of discomfort and skepticism that Brook was aiming to achieve, and reached quite successfully. Bibliography Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets by Margaret Croyden