THE BIRMINGHAM DAILY POST

Birmingham, Warwickshire, England

18 April 1962

(page 6)

LIVING THEATRE.

MASTER BROOK.

Anyone who remembers The Merry Wives of Windsor—it is strange how some plays are transiently neglected—will remember the line in which Falstaff says to the disguised Ford, “Good Master Brook, I desire more acquaintance of you.”

I have thought of Peter Brook (now joint director of the Royal Shakespeare Company) as “Master Brook” ever since the night, not so far back, when I went to a revival of Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine at a small theatre in Kensington. It was directed with revelling invention upon a stage that lay, apparently, beyond a deep chasm. That was the architect’s design, no idea of the director’s though maybe Brook, if asked, would have found a good many uses for it.

He was 20 then (in 1945), a compact young man of much charm with a smile that flickered mischievously round a pair of alert and good-tempered eyes. At Oxford he had given quite a lot of his time to the theatre and to films. Already he had brought to that omnibus-seat theatre, the Torch, off Knightsbridge, an undergraduate production of Doctor Faustus which I did not see, but in which, according to his lifelong habit of going to the best sources for advice, he had asked Aleister Crowley to advise upon black magic.