Hailed as 'the theatrical event of this century' (Sunday Times), Peter Brook's unique dramatization of India's great epic poem, The Mahabharata played to ecstatic audiences worldwide. In The Shifting Point, one of theatre's great visionaries assesses the lessons of his pioneering work from his brilliant debut at Stratford and the West End in the 1960s to the triumphant success of The Mahabharata. With the bravura and insight of a great practitioner and e...

"First there was the master conjurer adept at musicals, farces, opera and Shakespeare. Then there was the philosopher-king ... who has devoted his energies to a quest for a theatre that was simple in form and rich in meaning." - Michael BillingtonThe theatre's greatest contemporary director tells the story of his life.Peter Brook was the modern stage's greatest inventor. For over 50 years he held audiences spellbound with his critically acclaimed productions. This ...

Hailed as "the theatrical event of this century" (Sunday Times), Peter Brook's unique dramatisation of India's great epic poem, The Mahabharata played to ecstatic audiences worldwide. In The Shifting Point, his first book since The Empty Space, Brook assesses the lessons of his pioneering work from his brilliant debut at Stratford and the West End in the 1960s to the triumphant success of The Mahabharata. With the bravura and insight of a great practitioner and explorer he reveals some of ...

"Peter Brook is not only one of the truly outstanding directors of our time, he is also, undoubtedly, the only one whose skill as a writer equals his genius as a practitioner of the theatre." - Martin EsslinA new work from Peter Brook - the contemporary theatre's greatest inventor.Whatever the social and national barriers, we all have a brain and we think we know it. But, the moment we go inside, we find we are on another planet.Using Oliver Sacks' neurolog...

Peter Brook was the most consistently innovative director in Western theatre. In these three essays he returns to the concept of his first book The Empty Space and examines what that means for the life of a production. How can a company establish its own "empty space" - a rehearsal and performance environment which will encourage the actors to abandon the security of the hackneyed and release their true creativity?The potency of Brook's writing lies in his ability invest ge...

A unique dramatization of India's greatest epic poem, fifteen times longer than the Bible, The Mahabharata has played to enthralled audiences throughout Europe, the Far East and America. Regarded as the culmination of Peter Brook's extraordinary research into the possibilities of theatre, the production has been hailed as the 'theatrical event of this century' (Sunday Times). British audiences encountered The Mahabharata, on stage and television, in the late eighties. Thi...

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.

In these five profiles, four of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, the author evokes the life and work of seven gifted artists. Among those presented, often through lively conversations, are Jean Hélion, Mark Rothko, R.B. Kitaj, and Dennis Creffield. Chief among those portrayed however is Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), the great French photographer and photojournalist who, famed for dodging contact with the press, is here sketched in rare and fond detail. Of all the...

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley.Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone will not get him through”. Bayley took this to mean that an affable, genial, outgoing nature was not enough to ensure survival in a harsh world of statistical performance. But survive and flourish is...

Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there.The history of listening must be constructed from the narratives of myth and fiction, 'silent' arts such as painting, the ...

These meditations inspired by a Matisse painting are "a paean to the act of seeing, celebrating our capacity to be transformed by the truths art holds." — The New York Times Book ReviewNamed a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Nonfiction of the YearJust out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl,...

A thoughtful and deeply personal book by a master theatre-maker.In Tip of the Tongue, Peter Brook takes a charming, playful and wise look at topics such as the subtle, telling differences between French and English, and the many levels on which we can appreciate the works of Shakespeare. Brook also revisits his seminal concept of the 'empty space', considering how theatre – and the world – have changed over the span of his long and distinguished career.Threaded thr...