One practitioner who I have been highly influenced by when directing is Peter Brook and this was projected within my direction of ‘The Trial’; In particular his theory of  ‘Immediate Theatre’.

Theatre is a pliable art form that is constantly shifting day by day. Styles are ever changing and new forms of theatre are created each year, defining the concept of what ‘theatre’ is. The Theatre world can have such an impact on this world, and as a director, my job is to be the messenger between the story and the audience, enabling these two worlds to come together.

As Peter Brook states in the opening to An Empty Space, Theatre can be as simple as “a man who walks across an empty space whilst someone else is watching him” (1996, p.9). When this simplicity is fully embraced, and theatre is stripped back to its truest form, the power of what that story represents within the world can be put at the forefront of the performance; where audience opinion cannot be clouded by elaborate stagings the story can flourish. This is what we as a company wanted to represent, and this is, in short, is what ‘Immediate Theatre’ represents.

By stripping back the staging to 8 hanging photo frames, a door frame and a prop per-character, I wanted the audience to rely on the actor’s body and voice to create the world of the play. The actors could use the few pieces on set on stage in order to create different spaces and atmospheres that the audience would help build. Similarly I used the lighting states to highlight the actors and the story rather than tell it for them.

“Truth in the theatre is always on the move” (Brook, 1996, p.140), and Immediate Theatre represents that truth, where the Imitation of a remembered style is eradicated from performance and a reliance on the actor, the story and the shared experience becomes of utmost importance. Immediate Theatre strives to reinvent old styles and this is what I found particularly influential, and what became a key concept in our Manifesto and performance of ‘The Trial’. By using different forms of Theatre styles and merging them into a re-invention of these styles, we as a company were able to avoid ‘Deadly Theatre’ where the style becomes static and un-relatable to the modern audience. Therefore another fundamental aspect of directing the play was ensuring that I didn’t imitate previous productions and focused on using different aspects of styles of theatre to create a fresh innovative approach to the script. Therefore I ultimately decided to not watch any previous performances or adaptations of the play. I felt by doing this, the work we created would be a new approach to the text and would avoid the issues of ‘Deadly Theatre’. Instead I focussed on watching or reading about other work that I had enjoyed and utilising those to their fullest extent. Below are some of the many inspirations I took.

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Works Cited

Brook, P. (1996), The Empty Space, Atheneum