The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate |  | Author: Peter Brook
Publisher: Touchstone
List Price: $12.99
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Seller: stephaniesaxton
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 48651
Media: Paperback
Pages: 141
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0684829576
Dewey Decimal Number: 792.01
EAN: 9780684829579
ASIN: 0684829576
Publication Date: December 1, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Peter Brook's career, beginning in the 1940s with radical productions of Shakespeare with a modern experimental sensibility and continuing to his recent work in the worlds of opera and epic theater, makes him perhaps the most influential director of the 20th century. Cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of the International Center for Theater Research in Paris, perhaps Brook's greatest legacy will be The Empty Space. His 1968 book divides the theatrical landscape, as Brook saw it, into four different types: the Deadly Theater (the conventional theater, formulaic and unsatisfying), the Holy Theater (which seeks to rediscover ritual and drama's spiritual dimension, best expressed by the writings of Artaud and the work of director Jerzy Grotowski), the Rough Theater (a theater of the people, against pretension and full of noise and action, best typified by the Elizabethan theater), and the Immediate Theater, which Brook identifies his own career with, an attempt to discover a fluid and ever-changing style that emphasizes the joy of the theatrical experience. What differentiates Brook's writing from so many other theatrical gurus is its extraordinary clarity. His gentle illumination of the four types of theater is conversational, even chatty, and though passionately felt, it's entirely lacking in the sort of didactic bombast that flaws many similar texts. --John Longenbaugh
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
I guess everybody makes that mistake October 26, 2009
Lux et Veritas
The Amazon editorial review by John Longenbaugh says that Peter Brook is a co-founder of the RSC. Uh, no. That would be Peter Hall. Peter Brook became a resident director at the RSC in 1962.
 An innovator's ideas about Theatre February 13, 2008
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
I am not very knowledgeable about Theatre and certainly not about Theory of Theatre. I found this book quite abstract and difficult to understand. Its opening sentences sets the tone for the whole work.
"I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. An actor moves across this space while someone is watching and a piece of theatre is engaged."
This would seem to detach Theatre from local trappings and customs.
The book consists in an effort to define four kinds of Theatre, the Deadly or Conventional commercial theatre: the Holy Theatre based on sacred repetition , the Rough Theatre that of people in the steet, and the Immediate Theatre, the flowing transformative Theatre which Brook himself is trying to do.
As the author is considered one of the most revolutionary and important of modern Theatre directors I believe the book might be of value to those actually involved in 'doing Theatre' more than it is to the general reader.
Required Reading January 13, 2007
Sumner Alsace (NY, NY USA)
Before you read anything else on theatre, you should read The Empty Space.
Brook's Genius January 11, 2007
J. L. Wright (USA)
What is great about the empty space is that Peter Brook's theory is relevant to all art forms. The four theatres he describes are basically categories in which all art falls into. This seems odd at first until you see what he is describing. What turns most people off is the idea of over-categorizing art. But Brook's theatres tend to be more or less critiques of individual performances, or what the effect of that performance is on the audience. This is also easy to read. Too much theatre philosophy gets bogged down by either melodramatic thespian writers, or rambling philosophies from those who have not trained themselves to ge good writers. With Brook, it is pretty straightforawrd, not always easy to understand mind you, but straightforward. If you are at all interested in the arts then this is a must read.
Peter Brook January 10, 2007
Aynne Ames (Belfast, Maine USA)
This book, along with Uta Hagen's "Respect for Acting" and any Stanaslavski, is the motherload of theater expertise.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
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