Peter Brook and the ‘Two Worlds’ of Theatre

Abstract

The ‘two worlds’ of Peter Brook's theatre are its audience and its actors. According to Brook, the actors bring their ‘world of the imagination’ to meet with the audience's ‘world of the everyday’: but instead of the temporary suspension of belief in the ‘everyday world’ which a western audience has traditionally forced upon itself, Brook conceives the true theatrical experience as an interaction between the two modes of reality – those of the ‘imagination’ and the mundane. In the following article, Paul Cohen assesses the importance of this basic philosophy to Brook's productions since 1968, paying particular attention to the tour of Africa withThe Conference of the Birdsand the recent epic production ofThe Mahabharata, attempting to show that Brook's theory still directly informs the methodology and the performance orientation of his productions. Paul Cohen originally presented this paper as an MA dissertation for Vanderbilt University, and is currently on the Professional Writing Program of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.