The Empty Space breaks down the theater into four categories: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. …it’s hard to relate his opinions about the state of theater to today….” Fifty years later, is The Empty Space still relevant? How has the theater changed since its publication, and is it for the better or worse? As Adrian Noble wrote in a 1993 assessment in The Independent, the book “heralded an era of radical formal experimentation… Studio spaces, little black boxes, sprang up all over the country, allowing the classics to be explored in intimate relationship to the audience, and new writers further to deconstruct the well-made play.”īut that was then, and as Brook himself writes, “As you read this book, it is already moving out of date.” In 2011, an on-line commenter, then 27, crystallized the issue: “…I was born in 1984, the author has literally no knowledge of any performance I have ever seen in my life, nor have I seen any of the performances he describes. While traditional theatre companies and practitioners may have blanched at Brook’s critique of the status quo, the piece soon became a reference point on how to remake the dusty ancient stage, shifting uneasily into an age dominated by film and TV. Appreciative critics of the period included Time magazine: “Theatergoers who care about the nature and destination of contemporary drama will be drawn to The Empty Space with ravenous interest.” Derived from a series of lectures begun in ’65, its description of the state of modern theatre, confrontation with the art form’s past failings, and encouragement of its future potential, was blunt, informed, rebellious, new. The Empty Space, by the British director Peter Brook, was published in 1968, to both admiration and discomfort.
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