Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

304 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
French-born Yasmina Reza has had three of her plays performed
on Broadway, two winning its “Best Play” Tony
Awards—as well as two “Best Play” Olivier Awards in
London’s West End. The awards were for her 1994 Art
and 2006 God of Carnage; the former has been translated
into thirty-five languages and produced in hundreds of cities
around the world. Reza is clearly, as Amanda Giguere
writes in her book on her, “a global phenomenon.”
Born in Paris in 1959 of a Hungarian mother and a
Russian-Iranian-Jewish father, Reza has been, in a way,
an international figure since birth. Trained initially as an
actress, her first theatrical coup was as a translator, converting
Steven Berkoff’s English Metamorphosis (based
on Franz Kafka’s novel) into French; it earned her the
1988 Molière award for translation. Art, her most famous
play to date, premiered not in France but in Berlin, where
it then quickly moved to London and New York, then
Tokyo, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and other
cities throughout the world. Her 2000 Life X 3 premiered
simultaneously in Vienna, Paris, and Athens before
heading to New York’s Great White Way, and God of
Carnage premiered (in German) in Zurich. But playwriting
only represents a part of Reza’s accomplishments:
she is also a successful novelist and screenwriter, and,
in 2007, she spent a year traveling around the world with
former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and wrote a
book about him. (Her work revealed her dramatist’s eye:
“I think he is a tragic personality, a man bent on selfdestruction,”
she reported).
But drama, so far, is her strength. God of Carnage is
her other mega-hit, and the first to become a major film
(the 2011 Carnage). Close to the format of Art, it has an
elegant, urban, in-home setting where two couples, meeting
for the first time, try to decide what to do about a
playground fight occurring earlier that day between the
couples’ eleven-year-old sons. What begins over coffee
and cordial conversation ends with fury, threats, drunken
slurs, marital discord, and vomiting on the coffee table.
“You could describe my plays as being a theater of
nerves,” Reza has said, referring to this play. And yet her
results are hilarious. Once again Reza, like Shakespeare,
Molière, and Chekhov, has turned deep-set aggression in
social behavior into the farce of everyday human life.
The great success of Reza’s Art and God of Carnage
should not obscure her other fine plays that are regularly
performed today in Europe and America, including
Conversations After a Burial, which won her the
Molière Award, France’s equivalent of the Tony, and
Life X 3, in which one couple unexpectedly arrives a
day early to another’s dinner party—in three different
versions—that had a short Broadway run in 2000. And
her film Carnage, with Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet,
directed by Roman Polanski, has brought her rare genius
to new audiences around the world. Readers of this edition
should look forward to her newest play, How You
Talk the Game, which she directed herself in its 2014
Paris premiere and which was reviewed by Télérama as a
“brilliant satire” about a writer who comes to present her
latest work in a small town.
PETER BROOK
No director has been more influential in the later half of
the twentieth century than Peter Brook. Born in 1925,
Brook began his directorial career as a teenager during
World War II, startling English theatre-goers with
freshly conceived productions of Shakespeare, Marlowe,
Sartre, and Cocteau. In 1945, at the age of twenty, he was
engaged to direct at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre
at Stratford-upon-Avon and, shortly thereafter, at Covent
Garden Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera in New
York, and on Broadway. His 1955 Hamlet at Stratford,
with Paul Scofield in the title role, toured to Moscow,
becoming the first English company to play there in the
Soviet era. Brook’s career truly took off, however, in
1962 when, as the codirector of the new Royal Shakespeare
Company at Stratford, he staged King Lear, again
with Scofield, in a production deeply influenced by the
theatre of the absurd. Brook followed this two years later
with the English-language premiere of Peter Weiss’s
Marat/Sade, a production influenced in part by Antonin
Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Lear and Marat/Sade enjoyed
immense international success, both on world tours and
in subsequently filmed versions.
Brook’s publication of The Empty Space in 1968
established his reputation not merely as a director but
as a theorist as well. This long essay puts forth a brilliant
analysis of modern drama, which Brook divides
into “the deadly theatre, the holy theatre, and the rough
theatre” (corresponding, more or less, to the conventional
theatre, the theatre of Artaud, and the theatre
of Brecht) and culminates with a manifesto on behalf
of “the immediate theatre.” To Brook, the immediate
theatre is not something planned by the director, but
instead is something developed through an entirely
creative and improvisational process, “a harrowing
collective experience” rather than a polite collaboration
of craft experts. Brook then astonished the theatre
world with his vigorously comic and penetrating,