Heretics.

As a child, the director Peter Brook, the son of Latvian Jews who emigrated to Britain in 1914, showed an interest in photography, along with other aspects of the mechanics of illusion. He staged his own version of "Hamlet" in the family living room, writing on the script's title page, " 'Hamlet,' by William Shakespeare and Peter Brook"--an early auteur. During his student years at Oxford, where he began his directing career and counted the critic Kenneth Tynan as one of his friends, he was a cynosure, possessed of uncommon energy and ambition. After graduating, in 1943, he apprenticed in various repertory companies in and around London, staging works ranging from Jean Cocteau's "The Infernal Machine" to Shakespeare's "Love's Labor's Lost." Relatively quickly, he garnered acclaim in England's postwar theatre scene, in part because he bucked the country's tendency toward politeness, both on and off the stage.

Unlike most directors before him, Brook did not treat Shakespeare's texts as sacrosanct. If a line seemed to drag, he cut it. He also found young actors, like Paul Scofield, whose inner restlessness was not stagy but existential, reflective of the times. ("The theatre has no categories, it is about life," Brook declared in his 1993 book, "The Open Door." "This is the only starting point, and there is nothing else truly fundamental. Theatre is life.") In other words, he ushered a new reality into the British theatre--a "kitchen sink" rawness that likely paved the way for such playwrights as John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney to bring their own down-and-dirty view of English life to the stage.

Again and again, Brook criticized Britain's class system--and anthropological view of the world--by making work that was implicitly political, and intensely beautiful in its philosophical sweep. His mature work as a director began in 1963, with his excruciating and brilliant film adaptation of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." He further explored the worlds where politics and madness converge in his production of Peter Weiss's ingenious "Marat/Sade" (1964). (For this show, which transferred from London to Broadway, Brook won the Tony Award for Best Director, in 1966.) In both projects, Brook drew on his interest in the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud's "theatre of cruelty," seeking to jolt spectators into a heightened awareness of the performance taking place before them. Instead of resorting to the standard props of violence--guns, knives, poison--Brook had his actors use their voices as weapons of destruction; they screamed at one another or beat their chests or grimaced, and rarely smiled. Brook not only made physical and extreme the metaphors that Artaud and Jean Genet, for instance, used in their work to describe the brutalization of a mechanized society; he disassembled the concept of a theatrical troupe entirely and reassembled it in many different ways, largely by inspiring an emotional openness--even nakedness--during the rehearsal process, which was never-ending. (Brook is a great believer in improvisation and revision.) Brook's greatest star during this period was Glenda Jackson, who once recalled, of auditioning for Brook:

One had to do an audition, which Peter and his assistant director Charles Marowitz ran. You were told to go with a prepared piece and so I went and was told to do my prepared piece but within the context of a woman who opens her front door and is immediately bundled into a straightjacket and taken off to a lunatic asylum. . . . No one had ever asked me to do that kind of work in my life before, and I have to say it was an oasis in the desert. First of all, Brook was somebody who paid us the great compliment of believing that we were what we said we were, namely actors, and therefore we could do absolutely anything that was demanded of us. . . . Essentially he was looking for something that was not rooted--as I think British theatre was at that time--in a literary exposition of emotion.