Peter Stephen Paul Brook[1] CH CBE (21 March 1925 – 2 July 2022) was an English theatre and film director.

With them, he directed the first English-language production in 1964 of Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, which was transferred to Broadway in 1965 and won the Tony Award for Best Play, and Brook was named Best Director.

Brook was based in France from the early 1970s, where he founded an international theatre company, playing in developing countries, in an approach of great simplicity.

[12] In England, Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz undertook The Theatre of Cruelty Season (1964) at the Royal Shakespeare Company, aiming to explore ways in which Artaud's ideas could be used to find new forms of expression and retrain the performer.

[21] In 1971, with Micheline Rozan, Brook founded the International Centre for Theatre Research, a multinational company of actors, dancers, musicians and others, which travelled widely in the Middle East and Africa in the early 1970s.

[23] In the mid-1970s,[24] Brook, with writer Jean-Claude Carrière, began work on adapting the Indian epic poem the Mahabharata into a stage play, which was first performed in 1985[25] and later developed into a televised mini series.

In a long article in 1985, The New York Times noted "overwhelming critical acclaim", and that the play "did nothing less than attempt to transform Hindu myth into universalized art, accessible to any culture".

Gautam Dasgupta wrote that "Brook's Mahabharata falls short of the essential Indianness of the epic by staging predominantly its major incidents and failing to adequately emphasize its coterminous philosophical precepts.

"[27] In 2015, Brook returned to the world of The Mahabharata with a new Young Vic production, Battlefield, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne.

[29] The play was adapted for the stage by Marie-Hélène Estienne from a book by Amadou Hampâté Bâ (translated into English as A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar).

Columbia University produced 44 related events, lectures, and workshops that were attended by over 3,200 people throughout the run of Tierno Bokar.

[35] At the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, he directed Measure for Measure in 1950[11] and The Winter's Tale in 1952,[36] both with John Gielgud, followed there by Hamlet Prince of Denmark in 1955, with Paul Scofield (Hamlet), Alec Clunes (Claudius), Diana Wynyard (Gertrude), Mary Ure (Ophelia), Ernest Thesiger (Polonius), Richard Johnson (Laertes), Michael David (Horatio), and Richard Pasco (Fortinbras).

He directed The Tragedy of Hamlet, with Adrian Lester (Hamlet), Jeffery Kissoon (Claudius / Ghost), Natasha Parry (Gertrude), Shantala Shivalingappa (Ophelia), Bruce Myers (Polonius), Rohan Siva (Laertes / Guildenstern), Scott Handy (Horatio) and Yoshi Oida (Player King / Rosencrantz) in 2000, followed by a TV film version in 2002.

Brook's third merit is that of having discovered and given back a bright vitality to some great cultural and theatrical heritages which hitherto had remained distant from us both in space and time.