Croyden Margaret - Conversations with Peter Brook: 1970-2000

How did the Dream project begin?

Sally Jacobs and I started in New York. We said we were going to make a theatrical space in which theatricality could be celebrated. And that nothing was going to impose an actual shape on the story, nor would any of the costumes impose an interpretation on the actors. It would all be purely functional, in a theatrical way. The place had to be somewhere that told no story but enabled very difficult theatrical actions to be seen. So we had a place like a gymnasium, which told no storyit had to be whitein which people could be on wires, could be on the ground, could be in the air, could leap, swing, hang, fly, jump, and run. And that was the space.

I understand that you always start work on a bare stage and that you sometimes want to keep it that way.

Well, yes, we thought that. What would be wrong with a bare stage? Why should we put anything on it at all? And why should we have any costumes? Sally is the first personalthough shes a brilliant designer of costumes and sceneryto use, if this is whats right, working clothes. In USan experimental work about Vietnamshe scrapped a whole set of costumes in favor of jeans. So that at the dress rehearsal, actors, in working clothes, were closer to the basic reality of Vietnam, the subject of the piece. Here, we did start with a bare stage, and actors in working clothes, and we said, Whats wrong with that? Actors in jeans and sweaters. We rejected this in Dream for a very simple reason. Because there was nothing wrong with it, except that it was not joyful. The bare stage, the Stratford hall, was a rather negative statement. The actors in their own clothesthis was not the starting point of a celebration. We were making a celebration in Dream. We didnt want that great, stark, spare, empty desert. We wanted a small place. And we wanted a small luminous place. So we made a box.

How did the rest of it fit inthe trapezes and all that?

We wanted certain facilities in the box. We were not certain how it was going to be used, but they had to be there for people to jump and spin. So the instruments came into it. We used a million props in rehearsal, which we threw out, one by one, until we simplified it down to these few sticks. And then for the costumes, we said we did not want bare clothes, but brilliant and joyful clothes... Actors dress up because you can do more brilliant movements if you have a flying cloak; you can fly through the air more dazzlingly if you know that you are a streak of yellow moving through the air. Yet we didnt want any of those things to indicate, before we started, that this was the character of Puck, or this was the character of Titania. So, in fact, Titania was bright green, and Oberon was purple, and Puck was a streak of yellow. They were working clothes for performers trying to perform, proud of what they werethat is, performers enjoying performing in front of other people.