Peter Brook

Birth: 21st March 1925

Peter Brook is an English theatre/film director and practitioner who has been based in France since the early 1970's. His innovation and broad knowledge of the arts has grounded him in history as a successful artisan of the mid to late 20th century. Brook's works have been largely influenced by the works of Antonin Artaud and his ideas for the "Theatre of cruelty". 
In 1964, Brook was involved in the "Theatre of cruelty" season at the Royal Shakespeare Company, exploring ways in which Artaud's theories and ideas could be used to find new forms of expression and retrain the performer in ways that hadn't been explored previously. 
A showing of "works in progression" was the result, made up of a series of improvisations and sketches. Peter Brook's work has also been influenced by the theories of Jerzy Grotowski on the basis and ideas of experimental theatre. Brook describes his task as building 
"a necessary theatre, one in which there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one." Traditionally seeing audiences as passive observers, many experimental practitioners, including Brook, have wanted to challenge this basis.