Theatre quest: The pursuit of Peter Brook
Nonhlanhla Kheswa in Peter Brook's The Suit. Photo: Johan Persson
The last time Rob Bookman helped bring one of influential British theatre director Peter Brook’s plays to Adelaide, he had to get flights diverted so the plane noise wouldn’t drown out the actors.
The play was the nine-hour epic The Mahabharata, an adaptation of the Indian epic poem of the same name, which was part of the 1988 Adelaide Festival.
It was presented in a disused quarry at Anstey’s Hill in the Adelaide Hills – the same venue as his 1980 Adelaide Festival productions of Ubu, The Conference of the Birds and The Ilk.
“We got air traffic control to agree that for three weeks across the hours that we were performing … the early morning flights and the later flights in the evening would all be diverted to the other [southern] approach,” says Brookman, who is now CEO of the State Theatre Company of SA and at that time was associate director of the Festival.
“The logistics of it were huge because we had to bus the whole audience there. The location remained sort of semi-secret, so audiences came to the Tea Tree Gully shopping centre carpark and then we bused them in. It was a bit of a magical mystery tour.”
Stadium seating for an audience of 1200 had been built in an arena stage configuration at the quarry, and the performance went from 8pm to 6am, including a dinner break.
“I’ve seen performances of thousands of things over the years and it remains for me now the absolute high point,” says Brookman.
After that success, he and former Festival colleague and Arts Projects Australia co-founder Ian Scobie immediately set their sights on bringing another of Peter Brook’s productions to Adelaide.
“It was a long and fruitless pursuit, from my point of view, because three years later I left and went to Sydney Theatre Company and we still hadn’t nailed him down,” Brookman says, adding that APA did tour a number of Brook productions after 2007.
But his own 26-year quest did finally reap rewards, with the State Theatre Company bringing Brook’s celebrated play The Suit to Adelaide next month for an exclusive season, in association with Arts Projects Australia and the Adelaide Festival Centre. It will also be the Australian premiere of the work, which has toured to 37 other countries.
Set in a South African township in the 1950s, The Suit tells of a young worker who discovers his wife in bed with her lover; the man escapes, but leaves behind his suit. As punishment, the angry husband makes his wife treat the suit as an honoured house guest.
Featuring a cast of just three actors (Nonhlanhla Kheswa, William Nadylam and Ery Nzaramba) alongside three musicians, who play arrangements incorporating classical, jazz and African melodies, The Suit is based on a story by young writer Can Themba and was banned by the authorities when published in Apartheid-era South Africa. After being exiled, Themba turned to alcohol and died at just 44.
Rob Brookman describes the story as intense, yet gentle and funny. He says it reflects Brook’s interest in South African culture and humanity in general.
“It is very much about the relationships between men and women, but also about the relationships between any human beings in situations of power and disempowerment, and of the kind of strange psychological ways in which human beings can torture each other; the revenge that they can take through subtle pathways rather than physical abuse.
“It’s typical about what is great about Peter, in that he is so fascinated by humanity and he brings such humanity to the work he makes, so this is like an encapsulation of this whole approach.”
Brookman is effusive in his admiration for the director, whose innovative and sometimes controversial approach saw him viewed as the enfant terrible of British theatre in the 1950s-’70s. Brook was still in his 20s when he was appointed director of productions at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, and has directed more than 70 productions in London, Paris and New York. He has led the Centre for International Theatre Creation at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris for the past 40 years.
Brookman says that Brook “literally wrote the book” on directing – directors’ bible The Empty Space – and was hugely influential in changing the way audiences experience theatre.
“He really pulled theatre away from the sense of an artificial relationship between the audience and the performers and what was going on on stage, and argued really strongly for theatre that was actor-focussed.
“Empowering the actor is core to what he does. In a way that sounds relatively simple in relation to the theatre we see today, but when he was making theatre back then, theatre was very presentational … theatre was seen as something to be observed, not necessarily something to be felt and experienced.”
It was Brook’s desire for his productions to be shown in unconventional spaces that led to his first Adelaide Festival shows being staged at the Anstey’s Hill quarry in 1980.
“They said: ‘You just have to find a really big old theatre that has an interesting back wall’.
At that time, Christopher Hunt was artistic director of the Festival and Rob Brookman was operations manager. They were told Brook was very particular about where his work was performed; Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord’s own home in Paris was an old deconstructed vaudeville theatre.
“Because of that particularity about the relationship between the audience and the stage, and the feeling of the space, all of the regular theatres were off the table,” Brookman says.
“They said: ‘You just have to find a really big old theatre that has an interesting back wall’.
“Finding large old buildings [in Adelaide] with interesting back walls that didn’t also have a whole lot of pillars or columns in the middle of them was pretty difficult.”
He trekked around the city with visiting representatives of the theatre company to try to find a suitable venue, but to no avail. The idea of the quarry was eventually floated by Penny Chapman, then co-ordinator of Writers’ Week, who had worked on a film called Harvest of Hate that used the quarry as one of its locations.
The was just one problem: Bouffes du Nord managers said there was no way the company would perform in an outdoor space, mainly due to the risk of adverse weather.
“We got out all of the meteorological records that proved it never rains in March in Adelaide and went off to Avignon, where the company were performing, and had a pretty interesting meeting,” Brookman says.
The company’s administrative director was “apoplectic with rage” that it was July, the production was happening in March the next year, and the only shortlisted venue was outdoors.
“But in the end, Peter thought that it was a really interesting idea and they were reassured by the meteorological charts, and that season was a massive success. It completely sold out and it became a bit of a legend of its own.”
Several years later, The Mahabharata premiered in a quarry in France.
“They went on to perform in many quarries around the world,” Brookman says.
In the past two decades, he says, Brook’s work has become smaller in scale, focused more on intimate, intense stories. The director has also yielded somewhat on his demand for unconventional theatres, with The Suit playing at the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Dunstan Theatre.
“But the Dunstan has got that element,” Brookman says. “The fan shape of the auditorium goes some way to providing the kind of relationship with the audience that he really loves, and the fact that it’s a 550-seat theatre also delivers intimacy of experience.
“It’s one of the best theatres for drama in the country, I think, without a doubt.”
The State Theatre views the exclusivity of the Adelaide season of The Suit as a coup, with the SA Tourism Commission supporting the season with a targeted marketing campaign that it is hoped will attract up to 1000 theatre lovers from interstate.
Rob Brookman notes that there is a timeliness to the presentation, which comes as Brook turns 89 and after he recently stepped down as artistic director of the Bouffes Du Nord.
“Who knows whether he may have finally retired or not, but I think that there’s a better than even chance that this may be the last of his works to tour to Australia.”
The Suit will be presented at the Dunstan Playhouse from October 1-12. The State Theatre Company is also working with Media Resource Centre to present a respective of Peter Brook’s work with a special season of his films at the Mercury Cinema, including a 3.5-hour version of The Mahabharata.