Peter Brook was a teddy bear filled with dynamite

By then the director’s list of achievements included Genet’s The Balcony, the musical Irma La Douce which ran for 1500 performances and, back in Birmingham in 1945 (he was not conscripted during the war because of ill health as a child), his production of Shaw’s Man and Superman, the first of many rewarding collaborations with the actor Paul Schofield.

Those who encountered Brook, the son of Latvian immigrants whose Russian name was Bryk, often spoke either highly or memorably of the young director. Sir Barry Jackson, who founded Birmingham Rep and was a contemporary of Shaw, described Brook as “the youngest earthquake I’ve known.” Brook was also compared to “a teddy bear filled with dynamite” and by one of his actors as looking like “a wistful undergraduate [but] who rules like Ivan the Terrible.”

In later life, which was mostly spent developing international productions in his Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris, his reputation as a great director deepened. He was viewed by many as a sage whose wisdom was rooted in an openness to other cultures. Not least of these was “the richness and generosity of original Hindu thought”, as he put it in his sometimes stream-of-consciousness memoir, Threads of Time.

The reverence in which he is held led few (perhaps too few) to question the, to put it kindly, elusive rational behind some of his musings. “How much more is revealed by the way of bafflement than by the deceptive ways of reason,” he once wrote - which if I’m not mistaken is a little like saying more is learned by not understanding something than by understanding it.

Yet on stage the result of this intellectual and childlike sense of enquiry was a simplicity that spoke to audiences with a rare, even unique, clarity.

I was only six years old when I was taken by my parents to Brooks’s Dream. If they hoped it would spark an interest in Shakespeare, it didn’t. That would take many more years and plays. Perhaps they just hoped that something of Brooks’s production would stay with me. Something did. There were people. No, not people. Figures, not quite human, some of them suspended in mid-air yet languid as if recovering from a bacchanalian Sunday lunch.

Others were asleep. And the white of the stage was, I remember wondering, what being inside a cloud must be like. And I think I remember the silent astonishment of the audience.

What I now know is that Brook’s Dream was the antidote to what he described in his still relevant essays, collectively entitled The Empty Space, as joyless Deadly Theatre. This is the kind of theatre which despite it being done “in the proper way” with music and good actors who look lively and colourful, we nevertheless find “excruciatingly boring”. Nowhere, said Brook, does Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of William Shakespeare which is why when watching it we blame either the Bard, theatre itself or even ourselves.

It is a marvel to me that what I saw as a child was Brooks’s antidote to this condition and that it still lives as vividly in the mind as much of the theatre I have seen since.