Peter Brook on how Victorian traditions get in the way of Shakespeare, & on cultural appropriation

Excerpts from LA Times article:

 

In an interview with director Richard Eyre, Brook explained what he was after:
“I think that what was quite clear was that ‘Lear’ had suffered like all the other plays from tradition. … Because we hadn’t got a true Elizabethan tradition: we had at that time a very, very bad Victorian tradition that took you far away from the plays," Brook said. "It had put a wrong pictorial stamp on the plays and a wrong moral stamp, because the Victorian tradition told you very strongly who were the good and who were the bad people.”

 

[PF notes: This is often still true of other plays, including Hamlet, where performance- and critical traditions get in the way of new. insightful interpretations.]

 

[...] 

 

"The Mahabharata,'' Brook's epic production created with co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne and dramatist Jean-Claude Carrière, theatricalized for Western audiences the vast Hindu epic. The nine-hour work, a culmination of Brook's directorial investigations and experiments, was heralded as a masterpiece when it premiered at the Avignon festival in France in 1985. But charges of cultural appropriation were leveled by critics who felt the spectacle of exoticism dehistoricized sacred myths.

 

Brook refused to let this criticism deter his intercultural commitment. He was adamant in his 2017 interview with me that his position had remained unchanged: “Shakespeare is played in every part of the world. It comes from England, but the English have never said that it belongs to us exclusively," he said. "When I first encountered the poem, I saw that this was one of the masterpieces of humanity, but for complicated historical reasons it had hardly emerged from India. I felt, and this is a pure piece of romantic imagination, that we had been called to be the servants of the epic ..."

 

From Yahoo:
https://www.yahoo.com/now/appreciation-radical-majesty-british-theater-205045536.html?mc_cid=e8c438a865&mc_eid=ac4503e81f#new_tab

Originally from Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-03/appreciation-british-theater-director-peter-brook-never-let-his-eminence-crimp-his-exploratory-boldness

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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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