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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.
Peter Brook
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Theatre should uplift audiences, much like a doctor's visit aims to improve one's health.

In this quote, Peter Brook draws a parallel between the experience of attending a theatre performance and visiting a doctor. Both experiences should leave individuals feeling improved or enriched in some way. Theatre, like medicine, has the power to heal and inspire, providing audiences with emotional and intellectual uplift, transforming their initial state into something more positive.

Themes

TheatreHealingArtExperienceInspiration

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the impact of the arts on community, one might say, 'Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor...'

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

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