Peter Brook obituary

The director Peter Brook died yesterday at the age of 97, it was confirmed today.

Brook won several of his industry’s most prestigious awards, including multiple Tonys and Emmys and a Laurence Olivier Award, and became known for pushing the boundaries of theatre.

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage,” he declared in The Empty Space, his guide for practitioners of the dark arts of theatre direction. Published in 1968, it remains a guiding principle of theatre making more than half a century later. Brook continued: “A man walks across an empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

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