Showman v. Shaman

David Edgar

• Threads of Time by Peter Brook
  Methuen, 241 pp, £17.99, May 1998, ISBN 0 413 69620 0

For all its glories, the postwar British theatre has driven an embarrassing number of its brightest stars into exile. Conventional wisdom attributes this to a combination of parsimony and pragmatism. Finding the balance between inadequate subsidy and the need for the box office to make up the shortfall has contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British theatre, from a consummate King Lear to a definitive Midsummer Night’s Dream, decided to up sticks and set up an international company of actors abroad.