THE SKETCH

London, England

29 March 1950

(page 274)

Candid Cameo.

PETER BROOK.

Peter Brook, overcoated to the ears in his cold office at Covent Garden Opera House, looked like a small Teddy-bear. But he turned on me the face of an impish cherub. Plainly he should have been in gilt, blowing a rather long, thin trumpet, and tip-tilting over some reversed theatre proscenium.

The cherub had just arrived from the gravity of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. There he was rehearsing Gielgud in Shakespeare. Upstairs in the Royal Opera House (as Director of Productions) he still answered jabs at his Dali-fashion Salome. . . .

[ . . . ]

Once he resolves that something-or-other is logical, he does it. It may not be orthodox Shakespeare, Marlowe or Mozart, but it is good Brook—and, I repeat, never a stunt. It was not a stunt even when the Wonder Boy, ages ago, in the almost prehistoric 1944, invited Aleister Crowley to advise on black magic in an undergraduate production of Dr. Faustus—on the luggage-label stage of the Torch. Brook was merely going to the best sources for his information. The cast survived; to-day the Mephistophilis gives piano lessons.

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