Peter Brook directed several plays in England for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) before setting up his own drama centre in Paris in 1971. When it made its home at the Bouffes du Nord theatre, it became known as the Centre International de Créations Théâtrales. His original approach consists of being open to all forms, to all codes of theatre performance whether from the West, the East or from Africa. To build up a repertoire, he recruited his troupe from all over the world and each member brings their own dramatic methods, exposing and enriching them at the same time.
This insatiable curiosity for different worlds has benefited his audiences too, broadening their horizons through works such as The Mahabharata, I Am a Phenomenon or The Costume, or renewing their contact with classical plays such as Shakespeare's Hamlet or The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov – which he presents in new forms, in a tireless bid to render the stage indispensable for asking questions about the \'truth of life'.
Peter Brook also directs opera, films and has written a number works about drama.
At the Avignon Festival, Peter Brook presented L'Os (The Bone) and La Conférence des Oiseaux (The Conference of Birds) in 1979, The Mahabharata in 1985 and The Tempest in 1991.
Written in the 1970s by one white and two black writers, this play is being performed in France for the first time. It is a play historically linked to the apartheid era in South Africa, as it was written and performed in the townships on the outskirts of the cities, where blacks were \'kept'. The material for this play, born of the everyday life of these ghetto-towns, essentially comes from the real life of black people. The play was written out of necessity so that the spectator could re-appropriate their life, a satirical comedy that inspires cruel laughter, to combat the cruelty of ordinary life outside the theatre.
What interests Peter Brook most of all is the direct contact with reality and \'true life' through theatre and this play also allows him to continue his dialogue with Africa and African actors., notably this time Habib Dembelé. The authors of the play use the main character, Sizwe Banzi's search for \'papers that are in order', to describe the violence of the inhumane apartheid system, turning it into something pathetic and vain, forecasting its demise. Theatre of resistance by its humour, by the distance it has that is ironic and funny, this play goes beyond circumstancial reasons for its existence and is a universal fable which we hear even more acutely in a world which finds it increasingly difficult to accept so-called irregular situations. “What is happening in the bloody world? Who wants me? What is wrong with me ?” ...How many Sizwe Banzis ask themselves these questions today?
Jean-François Perrier
Distribution
adaptation française : Marie-Hélène Estienne
stage direction Peter Brook
avec Habib Dembélé, Pitcho Womba Konga
lumières : Philippe Vialatte
Production
Production : CICT / Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord