Peter Brook: and for my next trick … | Stage | The Guardian - 0 views
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In his youth Peter Brook was famed for his pyrotechnic dazzle. "He cooks," wrote Kenneth Tynan in 1953, "with cream, blood and spices: bread-and-water addicts must look elsewhere." But, at 85, Brook is a very different director. Since 1974, when he took over the artistic directorship of the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, his work has been characterised by its clarity, lightness and distilled elegance
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His 90-minute production of Mozart's A Magic Flute, which comes to the Barbican next week, is quintessential late Brook. Out go the opera's pantomimic spectacle, big processions and trios of boys and ladies. Instead, we have a stage bare except for bamboo poles and minimal props and a young, nine-strong cast who deliver the work – sung in German with dialogue in French – crucially situated in front of Franck Krawczyk at the piano. As Brook wryly says: "If you come to this production looking for something that will slam you in the eyes, you've come to the wrong address."
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The librettist, Schikaneder, obviously wanted a big, fun popular show with plenty of scenic effects. But he and Mozart were both freemasons and, at a time when the movement was regarded by the Archduke as a potentially subversive political threat, sought to create an opera that is about spiritual trial and initiation. For Mozart, freemasonry represented his intuition that there was something finer and purer in life beyond the material and the everyday."
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