Peter Brook

The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are sudde nly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life ... The marvel of being one.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

The meaning of a theater event is that none of us could see something so clearly as with the new energy that is brought with the meeting of a theme, actors living it, and an audience gradually entering it to live it with them. At that moment, a certain light appears, revealing what we would never have thought of on our own.

It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.

Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.

Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.

Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor. On the way out, one should always feel better than on the way in.

Preparing a character is the opposite of building-it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.

I am ready to disclaim my opinion, even of yesterday, even of 10 minutes ago, because all opinions are relative. One lives in a field of influences, one is influenced by everyone one meets, everything is an exchange of influences, all opinions are derivative. Once you deal a new deck of cards, you've got a new deck of cards.