The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 25

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH FRIDAY, MAY 1 1, 1998 25 ARTS Peter Brook, whose memoirs are out next week, tells Susannah Herbert there's a downside to being thought a theatre legend I hate it when they're in awe' any, name giants, London ATHER of toss bunch the in theatrical together direc- the of tor Peter Brook and the response will never vary. "If only he would come back to us. If only he hadn't left for Paris in the Sixties but were here, working, today. If only Britain welcomed intellectuals as France Half- how any man can live up to this litany of nel longing, Chan; sought him out in Les Bouffes du Nord. the appealingly shabby shell of a once ornate Paris theatre which has for 30 years been the crucible for Brook's sorcery.

6 I get people saying that they will be putty in my hands 9 At 73, in his woolly Lacoste pully and canvas trousers, he looks both ageless and wise, like a figure from a fairy tale. His hands are forever moving as if pulling on invisible threads, giving modern theatre's most praised director the air of a restless puppet master. "Why are you here?" I ask. meaning Paris rather than London, and bracing myself for some tirade against the enduring philistinism of the British state. I should have known better the man nicknamed 'The Buddha" by his doesn't do rants.

disconcertingly, troupes he doesn't do answers either. "Each answer is the starting point for a new question. And the state of questioning is a living and an open state. The whole of one's life is ultimately the expression of that question. You don't ask it.

It just asks you. And it's asking you all the time." He smiles beatifically at my bemusement. Decidedly, this is no man for small talk. The Greeks had the Delphic oracle. The Egyptians had the sphinx.

the French have Brook and, more importantly, they have his work. There's nothing mystical, he insists, about captivating an audience, whether it's a group of Portuguese immigrant workers huddled in a Paris hostel or the intellectuals currently flocking to Les Bouffes du Nord for his show, Je suis un a simple, gripping play about a Russian with a prodigious memory. "'I'm not interested, deeply, in anything theoretical," Brook says, half-apologetic at shattering the myth of himself as the theoristteacher. 'Every theory, every idea must be tested and rediscovered step by step. That's what theatre does: it comes to truth through experience.

"I remember being terrified before my first big Shakespeare production at Stratford. It was Love's Labour's Lost; I worked it all out beforehand, every move, with little arrows on pieces of paper. Then the first rehearsal began and I gave out the instructions. Everyone obeyed, but I looked and suddenly realised, 'This is dreadful. Stop, start My plans were no good, because they were plans.

From that day onwards, I never prepared anything in detail," he says, looking on Showman not shaman: Peter Brook once took 11 with approval as I discard my (prepared) questions with a grimace. 'You see. that's exactly what I mean. The beginning of a living process has occurred between us!" Disconcerting as it is to discover 10 minutes into an interview that you're playing a part in Brook's theatre "process" his delighted insistence on showing rather than telling. on turning everything into parables of his art, does what no dustdry of his achieve.

ments can ever do. It makes sudden sense of his rise and rise one of the great theatrical legends of all times. Son of a Latvian-born drug manufacturer who invented the laxative Brooklax, Brook grew up in Chiswick, west London, intoxicated by film and theatre. A young man in a hurry, he staged a Hamlet "by Brook and Shakespeare" at the age of seven, taking all the parts himself. At Oxford, his first stab at -making was poorly REVIEWS comedy is no laughing matter THIS is Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

satire of snobbishness and nouveaux riches aspirations, in a new translation by Jeremy Sams, staged by Martin Duncan. This is not. please note, the abridged version of the play that Duncan directed at last year's Edinburgh Festival. which ambitiously included Strauss's operatic Ariadne auf Naxos (originally written as a divertissement to be framed within script). Unfortunately Duncan's new production of the stage play which goes on to Birmingham Rep after Nottingham is unfunny.

James Bolam seems unenthusiastic in the leading role of Monsieur Jourdain, the social climber who is stinking rich but has no sophistication. In spite of warnings from his wife Klein). Jourdain the fact that (Beverley, he is being fleeced by aristocractic scroungers and scorned by the teachers and creative artists is paying to endow him with culture. The action is set in a grand chamber. Jourdain's interior decorator whose invoice probably made Lord Irvine's recent refurbishment bill look like a bargain has thrown together a mishmash of columns, antlers and padded leopard-skin panelling.

This mansion may be dripping with gold but Duncan's cast is lacklustre. The fencing, philosophy masters who give Jourdain a string of supposedly laughable lessons are so dull they nearly drove me up those padded walls. By the interval I was fantasising about hurling myself again the quilting just to keep myself amused. The programme notes remind us that comedies were rooted in the highly physical tradition of commedia dell'arte clowning. Yet Duncan's uninspired company stand rigidly to deliver their speeches.

There are a few interludes of dance and song. Bolam launches into a -hall jig. set to jaunty music by Timothy Sutton. But Sean Walsh's choreography is low on wit and the cast don't perform their routines with flair. Maybe they are inhibited by designer Tim Hatley's slippery -looking mirrored floor.

Still, why can't they put more welly into their character acting? This comedy of manners cries out for sharper characterisations. Sam Parks as the philosopher is at best faintly urbane when he could be a hilariously pedantic charlatan. Terence Maynard's nobleman Dorante isn't smarmy enough, missing the innuendos in the dialogue. No one brings out the nasty sneers and avarice behind the smiles of Jourdain's social superiors. Meanwhile Bolam, with a puzzlingly polished accent.

hardly comes across a as a downmarket parvenu, which completely undermines central theme of the gulf between social classes. Tickets: 0115941 9419 KATE BASSETT Making heavy weather of light entertainment THE RSC clearly thinks highly of Stephen Poliakoff's Talk of the City, and there is certainly no mistaking the play's ambition. The piece concerns the BBC in the late 1930s, and examines both the hugely influential radio output and the infant television service, then broadcasting to the tiny number of households some 2000 which actually owned a set. Poliakoff has plainly done his homework, and his portrait of the BBC is often both persuasive and funny. His hero Robbie Penacourt is an entertainer in the ITMA mould, presenting a Friday night variety show, complete with terrible police detective series and chorus girls who sing and dance in full costume, even though no one can see them.

The excitement of live radio broadcasts is beguilingly caught on stage, as are the patrician, impossibly plummy news broadcasts, and the sometimes malign machinations of the BBC's bureaucracy, as unimaginative and oppressive then, Poliakoff mischievously suggests, as it is today. The main burden of the play is that the BBC could have done far more to alert its listeners to the dangers of Nazism, and in particular to Nazi treatment of the Jews. The BBC's caution, some might say cowardice, in this respect is a matter of record, and the theme is undoubtedly potent. Poliakoff, however, makes exceptionally heavy weather of it. An earnest, fiercely intelligent Picture: NIGEL actors on a trek through Saharan Africa, improvising before received by the college dean, who made him sign a document promising never to have anything further to do with cinema or theatre.

It didn't work. By 20, he was a professional director; by 22, after shaking up the West End and Stratford-upon-Avon, he was "director of production at Covent Garden. Innovative, iconoclastic. fearless, he left no one indifferent and found inspiration everywhere his guides included Brecht and Binkie Beaumont. his astonished villagers epic The Mahabharata across four continents.

and once took 11 actors and a carpet on a 10.000-mile trek through Saharan Africa. improvising wonders before astonished villagers he sees himselt as showman rather than shaman. "An auditorium is like a small restaurant whose responsibility is to nourish its customers. he writes. "There is only one test: Do the spectators leave the playhouse with slightly more courage.

more strength than when they came in? If the answer is yes, the food is healthy." And with Brook, whatever weird detours are taken on the way, the answer is almost always yes. "Peter is the quester, the person out on the frontiers, continually asking what is quality in theatre, where do you find truth in says Peter Hall, who invited Brook to join him at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Sixties. "'Theatre of Cruelty, King Lear with Paul Scofield. work he did was unrivalled. He was always pushing in new directions and going new places, as well as geographically.

is a the greatest innovator of his TITH tributes like this many who and see there him are more as a god than a man it must occasionally be hard, I observe. for Brook to stay on track. undistracted by acclaim. Actors, for example. flock to him in Paris begging to join his troupe, the International Centre for Theatre Research.

The team, which he has built up over 30 vears. is multiracial and multitalented but wouldbe acolytes are politely rejected. "I get people saying. 'I will be putty in your hands': but really there's no answer to that. It's what I want." he says.

His accumulated prestige sits on him heavily. "It's terrible." muses, "to see that people who meet me for the first time are afraid. The only thing is to try to watch it and to recognise it as something permanent. inevitable. I can't pretend otherwise." Only once.

he adds, laughing. has his "aura" amused him: he was invited to meet a woman who had been involved in an "extremely nasty' murder case. "She was terrified of though she clearly hadn't been afraid of taking a hammer and coshing somebody on the head. She was afraid of saying the wrong thing about my favourite painter, or something. Pure intellectual intimidation.

It's the only time I've looked on this thing with detached fascination." His worries. about people treating him with undue respect putting on their best behaviour but acting their normal beastly selves away from his priest -like gaze could always be solved by disguising himself, I suggest. "I've tried that. changing my voice telephone but they still say 'Hello. Peter' right away," he sighs.

those master hands at work again. such a bad actor." casts could feature Laurence Olivier. John Gielgud, Paul Scofield or "an exceptionally beautiful girl whose only experience had been acquired as the mistress to a wealthy biscuit As he explains in his memoirs. Threads of Time, published by Methuen next week. his test of theatrical success is hard-headed.

Even when staging his least practical sounding projects toured his celebrated ninehour production of the Hindu A Fool and His Money Nottingham Playhouse Talk of the City Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon Theatre young man from the Talks department, called Clive, approaches Robbie with a view to producing a drama documentary on a day in the life of a Jew in Germany. Robbie becomes increasingly drawn to this radical in the cosy BBC nest, and a secret pact is hatched. Unfortunately it is at about this stage that both credibility and dramatic insight start flying out of the window. The scenes in which Robbie starts wildly improvising on air are entertaining, but they don't convince. The BBC would have stopped the broadcast and put on a record instead.

It is also hard to accept Poliakoff's thesis that broadcasting the truth about Nazi Germany would have transformed world opinion, forced Hitler to mend his ways and averted, the war. The wireless was a powerful medium, but not that powerful. Even the most harrowing TV broadcasts today can do little to rectify famine and poverty in the Third World. There is also the matter of technical clumsiness. Poliakoff's dialogue often sounds as stilted as a second-rate radio play from the 1930s and I fear this is not deliberate pastiche.

He also keeps springing surprises about his characters Robbie's bisexuality, the suicide of Clive's girlfriend without satisfactorily integrating them into the action. The play is a muddle, and needs a rigorous director to sort it out. Yet foolishly, the RSC has allowed Poliakoff to direct his own play, compounding the piece's confused implausibility. The performances, however, are first rate. 1 The charismatic David Westhead brings a memorably driven quality to Robbie, capturing the variety man's intellectual curiosity and emotional openness, while as Clive, Angus Wright suggests the overbearing arrogance of a man who knows he has a first-class mind.

Kelly Hunter supplies the piece with some much needed emotional depth as his girlfriend, though the part is woefully underwritten; John Normington is excellent as "Arnos" Grove, a devious bureaucrat who isn't nearly as vague as he pretends, and Julian Curry is touching as a confused old character actor. It is an intriguing, atmospheric and fitfully entertaining play, but as so often in the past, Poliakoff has failed to do complete justice to his subject matter. He is a writer who is always full of bright ideas, but only rarely does he make them sing. Indeed, too often here he seems content merely to preach. Tickets: 01789 295623 CHARLES SPENCER "Thrilling epic worth all its Oscars" THE NEWS OF THE WORLD LEONARDO DICAPRIO KATE WINS HIS A EN TITANIC.

TONE SHOWING AT CINEMAS CHECK LOCAL ACROSS THE COUNTRY OR PRESS DETAILS CALL FOR.