Any Event Stems from Combustion: Actors, Audiences, and Theatrical Energy

In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), David Williams presented a conspective overview of the work of Peter Brook at the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. More recently, in NTQ26 (May 1991), Paul B. Cohen analyzed Brook's evolving views on the interaction between performers and audience – the worlds of the imagination and the everyday. Here, Peter Brook himself, in conversation with Jean Kalman, discusses with a characteristically eclectic range of references and comparisons the idea of the theatrical ‘event’ and how it is generated, touching in passing on subjects as diverse as the construction and deconstruction of linear narrative and the significance and nature of improvisation. The interviewer, Jean Kalman, is a lighting designer who has collaborated with Peter Brook on many of his productions in recent years, including The Cherry Orchard, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert! and The Tempest.