63 Quotes by Peter Brook

You have to live to the responsibility of the person who has won, which is even greater than the responsibility of a person who has lost.

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.

It takes a long while for a director to cease thinking in terms of the result he desires and instead concentrate on discovering the source of energy in the actor from which true impulses arise.

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 theatre to be engaged.

Preparing a character is the opposite of building-it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor’s muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

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.

Shakespeare doesn’t belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It’s like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him – if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

I’ve always worked a bit like a cook in a big restaurant, where you’ve got lots and lots of things laid out and you go and look into one cauldron and you look into the other and you see what’s coming to the boil.