PARIS — How would you like to have a go at some Shakespeare? On Wednesday night, the British theater director Peter Brook, 94, sat onstage at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, as half a dozen audience members tried their hand at a line from “Othello.”
One inserted a long pause; another shouted it too close to the microphone, and the audience giggled. Brook listened intently. “Let’s just allow the words to vibrate,” he said.
The evening was a rare opportunity to hear from the director, too. For three nights, Brook, who has worked as a director since the 1960s and commands awed respect worldwide, was letting audiences in on his creative process. The project, called “Shakespeare Resonance,” was divided into two parts: an interactive lesson on the musical nature of Shakespeare’s verse, drawing on other plays, and an in-progress staging of “The Tempest.”
And Brook wasn’t the only esteemed director to pull back the curtain this month in Paris. At the Théâtre des Abbesses, the German director Thomas Ostermeier presented a preview of a production still in its early stages: “Who Killed My Father,” an adaptation of a 2018 book by Édouard Louis with the lead role played by the young literary star himself, in his stage debut.
It’s a vulnerable setup. Many artists hate presenting “unfinished” work, and in both cases, the actors had less than two weeks of rehearsals before the public were let in. Yes, the atmosphere at both performances was sympathetic: Everyone around me seemed to be on the edge of their seats, willing the artists on. When Brook, supported by one of his actors, and the rest of the cast first entered, the audience burst into spontaneous applause.
As a critic, workshop presentations are a tricky proposition. It would be churlish to review them like any other production or to complain about slip-ups (not that they were many in either performance). Yet this format also cuts through the pretense that we are dispassionate, all-knowing observers of fundamentally fixed works. Watching “Shakespeare Resonance” and “Who Killed My Father,” I didn’t care about the loose ends. I rooted for the artists involved, and I learned a great deal.
It’s a special privilege to listen to Brook talk about Shakespeare, a playwright he has returned to time and again over 70 years. He made his remarks in French, but the actors performed in English. While Brook’s main focus was on rhythm and inflections, he isn’t precious about accents: As often, he cast actors from all around the world in “Shakespeare Resonance.”
In the first part, Brook asked them to read a handful of lines from various plays, gently chiding them if their musical phrasing wasn’t to his satisfaction. On hearing Lear’s “Is man no more than this?”, he asked the performer to let the word “man” resonate “like a question.”
Brook moved to the first row of the orchestra level for the second part, and the cast launched into a one-hour condensed version of “The Tempest,” which pared the play down to an elliptical suite of scenes, performed with just a handful of props. At one point, when the mercurial Marcello Magni, playing Ariel, concluded a reply to Prospero with the words “were I human,” he lingered for a second on “human,” with a hint of regret. Suddenly, after hearing Brook’s earlier notes, his inflection stood out in the flow of the dialogue. It felt like being in on a trade secret.
Anyone hoping to see Brook direct in real time, however, will be disappointed. On the first night of “Shakespeare Resonance,” neither he nor his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, intervened during the run-through, or commented afterward. Then again, the cast didn’t need much help. Alongside Magni, Ery Nzaramba grew nicely into the role of Prospero, occasionally channeling a sinister, Gollum-like voice. As Miranda, Brook’s granddaughter Maia Jemmett, continued the family tradition with endearing sincerity.
Brook has worked at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord since 1974, when he discovered the abandoned venue and brought it back without bothering to add a fresh coat of paint. The wear and tear on the walls and the arch framing the stage (on which Hiran Abeysekera, as Caliban, climbs dexterously) are an integral part of the play’s atmosphere. “Resonance is a word that holds special meaning for me in this place,” Brook said at the beginning. “At night, here, you can hear the sound of silence.”
Ostermeier, the director of Berlin’s Schaubühne playhouse, made himself scarcer during the workshop presentation of “Who Killed My Father.” He warned the audience at the start that he might interrupt if anything went wrong, but he didn’t have to. In this one-man-show, Louis held the stage for 90 minutes with genuine instinct and feeling.
It would be impressive under most circumstances, but Louis, 27, who shot to global fame with his novelistic memoir “The End of Eddy,” had never acted professionally before. While he writes in his books that theater classes were an escape for him during his teenage years, working with a star director like Ostermeier — who has previously adapted Louis’s autobiographical novel “A History of Violence” — is like going from high-school music lessons straight to the Paris Opera.
“Who Killed My Father” starts with family history and ends in social critique, as Louis explores the government policies that cut his father’s welfare benefits and, according to him, worsened his dad’s health. Given that Louis wrote it, it might be unfair to say that he was far more believable than the actor and director who initially commissioned and performed “Who Killed My Father” for the stage, Stanislas Nordey.
Louis’ physical presence is more restrained, and he and Ostermeier are much bolder in highlighting his unease with the masculine norms his father imposes. He often wrings his hands, the very gesture that was deemed, he says, too effeminate in the working-class milieu of his childhood.
At several points, Louis dons a wig or a skirt and dances wildly, unselfconsciously, to the songs he loved as a child, shimmying and camping it up to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” He sings the latter to an empty armchair that stands for his father, with a raw-feeling mix of relief and hurt.
Perhaps it was the unvarnished magic of a workshop performance, but it would have taken a heart of stone not to indulge Louis, and repay his vulnerability with open arms.
Shakespeare Resonance. Directed by Peter Brook. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, through Feb. 21.
Who Killed My Father (work in progress). Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Théâtre des Abbesses. Further performances at the Schaubühne Berlin, March 20-22.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
