Peter Brook saw acting as an uncompromising search for truth

Not long after the second world war, as he walked through the ruins of Hamburg, Peter Brook saw a crowd of children pushing through the door of a nightclub. He followed them. Inside was a dilapidated stage with a backdrop of blue sky, and in front of it two sad clowns sitting on a cloud. The clowns were on a visit to the Queen of Heaven, and were listing which foods, all scarce in the starving city, to ask her for. As they mentioned various delicious things, the children grew quiet. Then, as he remembered it, the silence became different. They were transfixed. That silence became what he most desired to generate in the theatre.

That seemed a severe contradiction. For the best part of the next two decades he was known not for silence, but for noise. For his staging of Seneca’s “Oedipus”, the actors practised primal screams for hours and imitated beasts. In Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”, murder-screams set off bursts of scarlet ribbons. In “US” in 1966, a happening to protest against the Vietnam war, the audience was asked to imagine being napalmed in their gardens. Most famously, in “Marat/Sade” two years earlier, the inmates of the Charenton asylum were shown staging the murder of Marat in 1793 and the king’s execution, rampaging round the guillotine with pots of thick red and blue blood. Explicitly, he had wanted the whole cast to break down as they rehearsed.