Peter Brook on THE MAN WHO, an interview with Charlie Rose

In the words of Peter Brook
an excerpt from an interview with Charlie Rose

Watch the Interview

Years ago, I ran into Harold Pinter at a party in tremendous excitement… He said, ''I have just read the most remarkable book.'' I mean, he was so excited about it that I went away immediately to buy the book, which was Awakenings, and that was how I first heard of Oliver Sacks. The next step was to be as enthusiastic as Pinter and to come to New York, phone Oliver Sacks, leave a message, got a nice message back. We met for dinner at The Ginger Man and have been close friends ever since…

Without Oliver, I might never have found the way into this mysterious, unknown, and yet extraordinarily fascinating real world of neurology; and I would never have understood how neurology is something completely different from psychology, from psychiatry, from psychoanalysis, and reflects itself in ways that are so close to what the theater is there to show; that there was a field that was legitimate for theater. Without Oliver, I would never have found this. But we say ''inspired'' because we then had to -- ''we'' being the little team who have made this play -- all together we had to find our own experiences by going ourselves into hospitals and in a way going through the same path that Oliver had done, of seeing patients, being in consultations, watching them, listening to them…

The first step was reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat… Second step was to feel, strangely enough, this is material for the stage. Next stage is how the hell do you do this. And everyone I knew said, ''This is impossible… There’s no way of doing this…” Because it isn't written with a story… There's no narrative. Can you make theater without a narrative? It seemed to me of course you can, but how is what the work's about… So the next step was, of course, to invite Oliver to come over. We have a group who has worked together for a long, long time in Paris, and we spent a couple of weeks just working around the subjects -- Oliver telling us at great length extraordinary tales that are not in the book from his own experience. We talked about neurology. The actors improvised. And out of this big session, we came to the conclusion that we had to now reduce our big group to a very small little commando group to be able to go into the hospitals and study for ourselves…
 
We had a writer who's worked with us for years -- Jean-Claude Carriere-- and he came to me after a time and said, ''You know, I think that this isn't a job for a writer because anything I do as a writer is an intervention. I will be trying to make fiction out of this.'' It would be made into fiction. So we then thought: there's another way, and the other way was first of all to go and look, watch, and sometimes very, very painfully experience these cases. There was a group of four actors, a musician, and one person -- Marie-Helene Estienne-- who was like the literary editor, in the new English word, but something more than that: the person who was combining, coordinating, and sifting the material without it being written, in the way that a playwright would write it. Then, all together, we started working from our impressions, trying slowly and all together to find a theatrical form that was not just like in a documentary film because then there's no point in doing it in the theater. It was not just imitating, but it was not dramatizing. It was making this vivid through the actor, through the actor's behavior, through the actor's words, through the actor's performing, but in a way what-- I'll put it very simply -- all work really is condensing so that what in life takes many, many months, you have to shrink down day after day until it gets shorter and shorter, more compact, more compact, until in the end in an hour and a half you can actually give to other people the experience you have taken many months to get. And that's-- that was the work…
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Now Oliver, naturally, couldn't work with us on a day-to-day basis, which we would have loved, because he was here with a more than busy life. We were working in another language and on the other side of the ocean, working in French in Paris. So we kept in constant touch. He fed us all the time with tapes, with articles. We exchanged information, but it was only when we had made a shape that by chance he came to Europe, and we could present the very, very first run-through in a room about this size to him. And although he didn't speak French -- I mean, he knew-- I mean, he looked at it in the way that, that a doctor looks at every detail and can tell from what's in front of him what's going on so he understood everything and, fortunately, approved of what was going on, to our great relief.