The Echo from Within: The Role of Stage Music in Peter Brook's Performance of Shakespeare

Abstract

This study focuses on the performances of Shakespeare staged by Peter Brook since 1960, here approached from the angle of sound. The questions raised hopefully throw light on this stage director's reading of the fifteen Shakespeare plays he has produced over a period of sixty years, and point to some of the different ways in which sound can influence, or even shape, performance. Brook's theatrical terminology includes a number of sound metaphors and his concern has always been to give weight to the musical dimension of dramatic texts. The main musicological tools that have been adapted to analyse the material draw on the work of musicologists concerning the impact of music on an audience, and on studies of the relationship between sound and picture in the cinema and Jacques Bril's research on the symbolism of musical instruments. Their practical application to a few ‘audio-visual’ themes selected from Shakespeare performances since the 1960s shows how sound effects relay the spoken word to express the ineffable and the subtle, expressing the fundamental metaphysics of the play as Brook understands it. More generally, the concern for this specific scenographic device contributes in no small way to the audience's heightened awareness of the performance process itself, and enables us to perceive the nature of theatrical illusion as an artistic and holistic experience, rather than as an academic question or concept.