“The Empty Space” and Immediate Theatre

First of all, I should acknowledge that Peter Brook has many times more experience in theatre than I do, and that his ability as a director is fairly uncontestable.

Now that’s out of the way, in my honest opinion I didn’t love The Empty Space. The book has been hailed as a classic work on theatre theory; Brook divides contemporary (1960s) theatre into four categories and discusses the triumphs and pitfalls of each. He explains how the Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate theatres can intermingle, what they mean, and the lessons to be gained from each.

And for the most part, it’s meaningless. By this I don’t mean that Brook babbles like a fool or anything derogatory, but simply that it is so abstract as to be meaningless. It’s easy to get lost in Brook’s writing, full of run-on sentences, paragraphs that go unbroken for pages, and long lists of contradictory adjectives. This manner of writing, combined with the philosophical subject matter, often make it difficult to decipher what, exactly, Brook is trying to say. At times I was not convinced that he even knew.

This goes to the core of the problem with theoretical theatre: it’s slippery, ephemeral, and it never quite applies to reality the way you want it to. I don’t mean to say that theorizing about theatre — what it is, can, and should be — is worthless. Rather, I think that every theatre-maker and -goer should ask themselves these questions. But it is a highly individual process.

Theatre is, for me, all about empathy and engagement. Whatever manner a particular play needs to become its most engaging, to encourage the most empathy and connection from audience members, is how it should be staged. Frankly, I think that there are very few wrong answers, but very often right answers done poorly. Each production is a unique grouping of people, talents, and insights, and every group has to figure out the best way for themselves to work together and create a “whole” production. No aspect of theatre can stand alone. There is no formula to apply and end up with the Perfect Production.

That’s the crux of my issue with theoretical theatre books. Dividing theatre into “good” and “bad” is arbitrary, and every individual will have a different idea of which productions fall where. Even those shows that are unanimously seen as awful have their place; bad theatre reveals what we don’t like, allowing us to imagine ways in which we might make it better. Young theatre artists often learn more from being in a “bad” production than a good one. If “truth in the theatre is always on the move” (157), then poorly-done theatre is an important tool to motivate change and push in the direction we want to go.

Of course, no one wants to be the one making bad theatre. And if one makes a career of it, we may begin to question their abilities and taste. I think that this is what Brook means by Deadly Theatre: theatre that is caught in a rut. For example, my high school director, who is a very intelligent, experienced theatre-maker, really only puts on one type of play. He has a predilection for old, sometimes political, and usually highly cognitive plays, all of which are staged in the same style. The drama program, as a result, has rather stalled in terms of innovative practices. For the students who act, crew, and design the shows, the constraints of these stuffy plays are valuable: the dedicated ones who want to produce good theatre identify the problems and adopt different solutions to them; it forces them to think critically about their work. When I was a student there, I loved it. It wasn’t the type of theatre I wanted to make for the rest of my life, but it was valuable theatre nonetheless. I was proud of my work, but not satisfied with it; I came away feeling that I had done my best, and was learning how to improve upon it.

That was not the case for everyone in the program, however. There will always be a number of people who were content not to look past the director’s personal views and instructions and so are not looking to improve upon them or their own performance. This is, I think, where the deadliest theatre arises, when actors and designers who are content with their work come together with directors equally unprompted to attempt for better. They may be able to produce work that is “good enough,” and so keep this deadly theatre that should be limited to student and amateur work in the mainstream. Their subpar productions give audience members the chance to conceptualize a better theatre, but they deny themselves the same liberty.

So, for me, the difference between bad theatre and good theatre is not a particular method of staging, or of acting; it has nothing to do with the number of set design elements or the particular exercises the director has the actors do. The heart of good theatre — theatre that is invigorating to work on and to see performed — is the continual search for better and the inquisitiveness and excitement of discovery that it brings. Bad theatre will always happen, as a product of trying something new or not being sure how to proceed, and it has its value. But bad theatre should always be a starting point, a place from which those involved can continue to evolve.

Brook speaks about the search for a “living theatre.” I posit that if each individual involved in theatre were to stop accepting “good enough” and start searching for theatre that most engages them, we will have a living theatre. It is this search, this thrill of discovery, that people speak of when they talk about the first moment that they fell in love with theatre. If we were all to chase that feeling, we would be truly engaged in theatre, from audience members to designers to directors and actors. Theatre is at its best when the people who are presenting it are truly excited about their work.

The Empty Space is a consolidation of Peter Brook’s own, individual striving towards a better theatre, and I respect him for that. I found incredible value in the book as a thought exercise, a prompt for myself to examine my own views of theatre, but I find it utterly useless as an instruction manual for good theatre. My impression of the book immediately became more favorable when Brook acknowledged this at the very end, even pointing out that as he wrote the book it was already moving out of date. Immediate theatre, as Brook calls it, must always be a product of its time, and I wonder what a further 50 years since the publication of The Empty Space has meant for Brook’s own search for immediate theatre.