Peter Brook

He was called “the greatest innovator of his generation,” leaving an indelible mark with plays, musicals, opera and a relentless curiosity.

He had ceased preplanning, or “blocking,” movement onstage as a young director in 1946, when he came to the first rehearsal of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” with plans that, after a few moments with the actors, he realized were absurdly inflexible and promptly tore up. Indeed, the most successful of the few films he eventually made was a 1963 version of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” which Mr. Brook described as “a potted history of mankind.” In 1968, he published a series of influential lectures under the title “The Empty Space.” Here he made his celebrated distinction between four varieties of theater: “deadly,” signifying hackneyed or ossified; and “holy,” “rough” and “immediate.” At his Paris center, the aim was to synthesize the last three: to use simple, or rough, means to bring to immediate life theatrical work that combined an earthy, even comic, feeling for human reality with a holy search for the elusive, hidden and mysterious. As Mr. Brook told The Times in 1998, “I am ready to disclaim my opinion, even of yesterday, even of 10 minutes ago, because all opinions are relative.” Theater, Mr. Brook wrote in his memoir, should affirm “that light is present in darkness” and be “a powerful antidote to despair.” The search led to what he called the “Theater of Disturbance” — as exemplified by “Marat/Sade,” his exploration of madness in revolutionary France, and “US,” his evocation of the Vietnam War — and to such inquiring works as “The Man Who” and the 1996 play “Qui Est La?,” which used readings from Bertolt Brecht, Konstantin Stanislavsky and other theoreticians and combined them with “Hamlet” as they might have staged it. Much was dark, troubling, even despairing: “Titus,” “Lear,” “US” and, in 1975, “The Ik,” which involved an African tribe morally ruined by relocation and lack of food. But he seldom went to the theater as a boy, thinking it “a dreary and dying precursor of cinema,” as he later put it, and aspiring to be a movie director. But his employment ended in disgrace after he shot an advertisement for a washing powder in the style of “Citizen Kane.” Some mark that change at his 1960 Paris production of Jean Genet’s “The Balcony,” a work considered boldly subversive at the time. He brought a stunning nine-hour adaptation of the Sanskrit epic “The Mahabharata” from France to New York in 1987. Mr. Brook spent most of the first 15 years of his career in the commercial theater.