Visionary theatre director Peter Brook created Holy Theatre in an ‘Empty Space’, echoing the Buddhist teaching of Emptiness and Tibetan Buddhist meditation
When I was a theatre student in the 1980s Peter Book, who died this week aged 97, was already a legendary figure. He’d decamped to Paris, but his generation of directors had transformed British theatre with their belief that, starting with Shakespeare, drama should always be visceral and contemporary.
Brook had another dimension, though. My own love of theatre had started with seeing productions that created a heightened, morally compelling experience which I found deeply exciting. Brook’s theatrical manifesto The Empty Space explained how he set about making that happen.
To find the creative heart of a character or a play, he says, the director and actor must be honest, rigorous and imaginative, stripping away convention, ego, habit and pretence. What remains is an ‘empty space’ where something special can happen. Brook calls this a Holy Theatre in which invisible aspects of life, such as human consciousness and states of being, can be made visible through spirituality, mystery and ritual.
The idea of the empty space returned to me when I started to practice a meditation drawn from Tibetan Buddhism. It begins by imagining that the world has dissolved into a vibrant, unbounded blue sky, and that you’ve dissolved in the same way. The sky represents emptiness, or sunyata, the ungraspable ground of being. Everything we experience manifests within that space, Buddhist teachings explain, and we can either fill it with our habits, or open to its possibilities.
In the practice, a Buddha figure appears in the sky. Its form is dictated by traditional iconography, but it represents the sublime distillation of a quality such as wisdom or compassion. If you feel this quality within yourself, you become wisdom, become compassion, imaginatively speaking – within the theatre of the mind.
One critic called Peter Brook ‘a showman and a shaman’ because he combined a quasi-religious search for truthful expression with a flair for performance. I would say, he made theatre a ‘spiritual practice’ that understood the powerful possibilities of human life.
‘We know that the world of appearances is a crust,’ Brook writes in The Empty Space. ‘Under the crust is the boiling matter we see if we peer into a volcano.’ The question is: ‘How can we tap this energy?’
