Theater Log Book Term 3 - January 20th 2014

Peter Brooks believed that ‘the problem of the Deadly Theater is like the problem of the deadly bore’. His ideology was that Deadly theater can at first sight be taken for granted because it means bad theater.

Peter Brooks liked to challenge the traditional theater, by going against it's usual morals. He said that 'I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged'. In other words, he believes that from human experience, there cannot be an empty space with no meaning or feeling towards it. In this case he would create a piece of theater in places that many people wouldn't consider a performing stage.

He said that Deadly Theater never meant dead: but it meant something depressingly active, in this case very capable of change.

In many ways Peter Brooks was thoroughly inspired by Artaud's 'Theater of Cruelty' ideology. He wanted to also break down the fourth wall between the actors and the audience, by creating weird immerse theater.

Peter Brooks asked questions such as Why do we applaud, and what? Has the stage a real place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it serve? What could it explore? And, what are its special properties? Peter Brooks wanted to be able to answer all of these questions through theater, and including the first steps of change which is facing the simple unattractive fact that most of what is called theater anywhere in the world is a travesty of a world once full of sense, combining war, peace and a colossal bandwagon of culture onto stage.

In relation to Antonin Artaud's theory, he wanted to include the idea of 'reality being a world with many meanings'. Peter Brooks said that 'the closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance, you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness, you aren't moved'. This relates to Antonin Artaud's theory because from what I've learnt about him, he used to take several drugs in order to get entry into other sealed off worlds, and to hallucinate and experience dreams in reality. This was called surreal theater, in which dreams are combined with reality, which allowed the audience to experience a different type of reality.

Artaud believed that theater loses its power and ability to communicate when it attempts to be literary (naturalism), it doesn't change us. He wanted a theater that would exercise us, so that we are changed on a deeper level, a theater beyond the barriers of rational intellect, not just entertainment, wanted something more like a religious experience, exploring the inner world of man. He influenced Peter Brooks who speaks of the responsibility of the audience, and combining the spectators and the audience together.