Threads of Time: Recollections (Paperback)

by Peter Brook (Author) "I could have called this book False Memories..." (more)
Key Phrases: Madame de Salzmann, New York, Covent Garden (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
When the 18-year-old, self-taught director Peter Brook brought his first play to the London stage he inaugurated a long and illustrious career. Perhaps best known for his London production of the play Marat/Sade and the nine-hour stage epic Mahabharata, Brook also directs film--Lord of the Flies is his best-known movie--and opera. In his uncommon autobiography, he assiduously avoids "personal relationships, indiscretions, indulgences, excesses, names of close friends, private angers" as well as "taboos [and] hang-ups." Instead, Brook focuses on the development of his artistic vision, his philosophical leanings and his quest for meaning in both of these areas. With Threads of Time, Brook proves that he is also a talented writer for he pulls together the strands of his experience and ideas to offer readers an evocative view of his fascinating life. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Stage and film director Brook's soulful, introspective autobiography is as different from the conventional show-biz memoir as his imaginative productions are from traditional commercial theater. Born in 1925, London-raised and Oxford-educated, Brook made his mark in the 1950s and '60s with inventive Shakespeare (a blood-soaked Titus Andronicus, an acrobatic Midsummer Night's Dream) and avant-garde European works (Marat/Sade). He relates also that he was immersed in the mystical teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, and in 1971 founded the International Center for Theater Research, which brought together actors from different traditions and countries in an attempt to make theater reach across cultural boundaries and become truly universal. The productions resulting included The Mahabharata and The Man Who (based on the writings of neurologist Oliver Sacks); Brook's descriptions of how these unusual pieces were collaboratively created are as absorbing as his cogent analyses of earlier working relationships with actors like Paul Scofield and John Gielgud. The director is not an other-worldly metaphysician: he relates his spiritual discoveries very precisely to the insights they gave him about the theater. There is no gossip; his two children are mentioned just once; his wife (actress Natasha Parry) appears primarily as a working companion. Instead of personal chit-chat, Brook offers the chronicle of a committed quest. It leaves a moving impression of a man deeply fulfilled both spiritually and artistically. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1 edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430187
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430188
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #887,295 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is perhaps his best and most revealing work, October 12, 1998

By	[e-mail] (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Threads of Time: Recollections (Hardcover)

Mr. Brooks latest work is also his most personal. Not in the sense of the typical autobiography, which usually highlights the tawdry detials, but in a truly inner sense. His journey through both theatre and his inner world is illuminating, to both artists and non-artists alike. I was particularly facinated to read of Mr. Brooks experiences with the Gurdjieff work. His depth of insight into the importance of inner work in tandem with his insights into theatre and film provide great reading, for those familiar and unfamiliar with his work. I highly recomend this book, as well as his other works.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Candid Camera, June 8, 2006

By	James Moore (LONDON) - See all my reviews

Candid Camera
James Moore
Perhaps when Peter Brook celebrates his hundredth birthday we may anticipate a retrospect with some revelatory twist, stylistic shimmer, or special insight into this bafflingly complex character.
Meantime we have Michael Kustow's Peter Brook: A Biography, a well-meant journalistic reprise with all the poetry of "the time sponsored by Accurist". We are reminded that Brook's `white box' production of `A Midsummer Night's Dream' was a succs fou; that his book The Empty Space re-energised theatre; and that he discreetly resonates to the spiritual teaching of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.
During his long life Brook has met many people with interests similar to his own: and certainly many with magnetic readership pull - Castro, Grotowski, Hitchcock, Capote, Aleister Crowley, and Jean Genet (whom he alarmingly wanted to be Godfather to his daughter). Yet significantly A.W.O.L from Kustow's text and ten-page index is William Segal, hero of A Voice at the Borders of Silence.
If Kustow's is a dutiful exhumation, the Segal item (fulsomely prefaced by Brook) is an unindexed and undisciplined scrapbook, thrown together like a rich plum pudding by its subject's widow Marielle Bancou-Segal. So blatantly does it sacrifice critical vigilance on the altar of conjugal love that it bids to give hagiography a bad name. Everyone gets swept away in a Tsunami of mutual admiration: Segal thinks gods to Brook, while Brook recklessly asserts that Segal's "innermost core was an opening to eternity".
Thirty evocative photographs redeem Kustow's biography (not least David Farrell's trapeze-lofted Oberon and Puck in the fairy realm above Bottom and Titania) and Brook himself is modestly presented...Segal was anything but camera-shy, blatantly viewing his entire existence as a serial photo-opportunity. When young he was photogenic in All-American mode: in old age, following a drastic car accident, he deployed a monocle and piratical black eye patch. He was an artist too. "William Segal the painter", explains Brook, "looks at the outside world and leads us into William Segal the man." He certainly does. Most of his paintings are self-portraits; his motive being analytical - and apropos he nods kindly to Rembrandt.
Brook has powered forward from Doctor Faustus in 1943 to Tierno Bokar in 2004, like a self-fulfilling prophecy - "a man who has guided his own profusion to a rich simplicity" claims Kustow, in his best sentence. By contrast, the young New York sophomore William Segal, heralded as the speediest left halfback of a decade and sentenced to "a brilliant gridiron future", quickly swerved vocationally. Of Romanian Jewish ancestry and entrepreneurial flair, he somehow broke into fashion publishing and became emancipatingly rich. Looking down from his elegant office in Empire State Building, he would sometimes ruminate on profit margins, sometimes on difficulties facing "the average person", and sometimes on Meister Eckhart.
Aptly enough, in the early 1940s, aged about thirty-eight, Segal chanced to fall in with the author of Tertium Organum Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky ("a regular fellow in many ways"); in 1947, the year Ouspensky died, Segal met the prolix Zen theoretician Daisetzu Teitaro Suzuki - cultivating him and even taking him to meet Madame Ouspensky and watch sacred dances at Mendham, New Jersey; in 1948 and 1949 Segal won sporadic contact with Gurdjieff himself, teacher both of Ouspensky and of the avant-garde lesbian Jane Heap. By 1951 Brook, aged twenty-six, had become a pupil of Heap in London, and Segal had launched the bon ton journal Gentry ("It truly had a superior audience")...Curious lines were now converging.
It is Brook's endorsement of Kustow's biography which dignifies it; here then is the memorial or C.V. favoured by a first-rank cultural icon...Arguably more oblique is the American book's significance. The wearisome extolling and self-extolling of Segal ranks for nothing historically compared with the en passant disclosure of how traditional Gurdjieffian praxis was radically modulated by a hitherto unsuspected coterie; those photographs alone are as revealing as a C.C.T.V. camera.
Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, never went to Japan but Segal did - and became entranced. Arriving in a B-24 bomber carrying introductory letters from D.T.S. ("I could see I was on the beam with Suzuki right from the start") he hit the Zen Buddhist trail. As year followed year, Segal captured the interest of Madame Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff's de facto successor, and her son Michel the heir apparent. Respectively at Kita Kamakura and Ryutaku-ji monasteries Segal introduced the de Salzmanns to Suzuki and Soen Nakagawa Roshi (superb calligraphist, haiku composer, and innovatory celebrant of the tea ceremony using instant coffee and polystyrene cups).
The striking Sacred Dances which climax Peter Brook's film Meetings with Remarkable Men are supremely ranked in the portfolio of Gurdjieffian praxis, and no-one has prospered them more than Jeanne de Salzmann. In Japan she nevertheless allowed herself to be persuaded by an insistent Segal and Nakagawa that they needed buttressing by Zen-like meditation `sits'. Difficult to guess the critical moment when Madame de Salzmann acceded. Perhaps it was in cherry blossom time in 1966 when Suzuki, crying "Here, Mr Segal!", threw a startled cat at him. Certainly the grand policy shift delighted Segal: "Because you can sit for 100 years and still say, oh yeah, I feel good."
Segal died in 2000, aged ninety-six. And had he actually met Brook? Oh indeed, time after time (and sports ten photos to clinch it). As for his `enlightenment', one only wishes it were susceptible of forensic proof. Yet if this self-fixated pilgrim inspired just one "average person", let alone Peter Brook, that must suffice.
James Moore is author of `Gurdjieff:
the Anatomy of a Myth' (1991) and of
the Gurdjieff module in `Dictionary of
Gnosis and Western Esotericism' (2005).