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 culminat...