Peter Brook: Of masters and masterpieces

Peter Brook is talking eagerly about passports, work permits and forged identity cards. Nibbling on a bread roll as he speaks, this internationally celebrated director - who turns 82 this week - is having to make himself heard over the din of a Paris bistro. Round the back of the Gare du Nord, abutting the bistro, his world-famous Bouffes du Nord theatre is sandwiched between rail tracks and a busy hooting crossroads. Indeed, for a moment, Brook - author of the hugely admired theatre-makers' credo, The Empty Space - is completely drowned out by an ambulance caught in the traffic jam outside. He pauses. Then, quick as a flash, one hand darts up from the table. "I have said and written so much about how the theatre must, all the time, be changing but one must keep in touch with that," he emphasises, his index finger pointing after the ambulance's tail-lights - a bit of real life.

He is, moreover, engaging with the matter of passports, permits and ID cards because his latest production - coming from Paris to the Barbican Arts Centre in London in May - is a new staging of Sizwe Banzi is Dead. That is the groundbreaking 1972 play co-authored by Athol Fugard and the black South African actors Winston Ntshona and John Kani - then unknown, but now fêted. It tells the story of an impoverished black migrant worker who, trapped by punitive Apartheid restrictions and a blotted passbook, learns to survive and beat the system. He ultimately gains a new, more hopeful lease of life by assuming a corpse's discarded I.D.

Though only a two-hander, Sizwe Banzi is a historically important work, for it started the wave of what came to called South African protest theatre. In fact, the Barbican is not the only leading London theatre to think the piece deserves another look. Quite accidentally scheduling a twin production, Nicholas Hytner has invited Kani and Ntshona to perform their own revival too, running at the National Theatre from next week.

Brook holds that, in touching on the pain involved in losing one's sense of identity, the play embraces "the question of 'Who am I?', the human, spiritual, philosophical question that goes back to Socrates and Pythagoras but," he underlines, "that question today for three-quarters of the world [comes down to] somebody saying, 'Show me you papers!' It's about papers... This character in Sizwe Banzi is exactly like someone who has come through Sangatte in a container," he states.

This is winningly down-to-earth given that Brook has, for years now, been regarded as an almost mystical guru with a rarefied aura. As the greatest innovator-director-theorist since Vsevolod Meyerhold, he has - not entirely beneficially - become a legend. Brook is now treated by many with near-religious reverence when his productions pay occasional flying visits to England, the country that he quit for France, for better funding and more creative independence, over 35 years ago.

Born in Chiswick, west London, in 1925, he was the son of Russian-Latvian emigrés. His warmly encouraging father was a political protestor-turned-inventor and pharmaceutical manufacturer (Brook Snr made his name with the best-selling laxative, Brooklax). The family was comfortably off, though Brook Jnr hated the institutionalised bullying at his English private schools, and his Oxford college tried to send him down for rule-breaking. Undeterred, he became a wunderkind on a stratospheric ascent. While still an undergraduate, he directed a low-budget film of Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and staged Doctor Faustus, fearlessly inviting Aleister Crowley to advise on the black magic (afterwards Brook hid the old devil in his rooms for one hell of a surprise party).

In his early twenties, Brook shot off to work with the young Paul Scofield in Birmingham and become a polemical director of productions for the Royal Opera House - where the scandalised traditionalists hastily ousted him for putting on Salomé with sets by Salvador Dalí. Generating yet more radical work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Brook staged landmark productions, including the visceral, Antonin Artaud-inspired Theatre of Cruelty season of 1964, with Glenda Jackson in Marat/Sade, and his white box-and-trapezes Midsummer Night's Dream which was a joyous blast of fresh air in 1971. This last production inspired a whole generation of younger directors including Hytner, Deborah Warner, and Simon McBurney, as did his treatise The Empty Space (1968) and its wonderfully simple thesis: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."

After Midsummer Night's Dream, Brook did a vanishing act, heading off to establish his troupe in Paris, bringing together performers from all over the globe with a mission to discover the essence of live storytelling, the purest, simplest elements of theatre. Whilst embracing epic myths such as The Mahabharata - performed from dusk till dawn in a quarry near Avignon in 1985 - his work has fundamentally become smaller-scale over the years, pared of extraneous clutter. His company toured African villages with a just a carpet for a stage and, at his beautifully delapidated Bouffes du Nord, he has been moving towards the theatrical equivalent of a Zen garden, albeit with deliberately rougher edges.

The artistic progression has run in tandem with his spiritual "search for the sacred". This has entailed various treks across Afghanistan and other lands, accompanied by his actress-wife Natasha Parry, on the look-out for monastic Sufi sages and dervishes. As for his alternative 1960s directing techniques, according to one comic anecdote about his Old Vic rehearsals for Seneca's Oedipus, John Gielgud was called upon, in a collective cast exercise, to emotionally bare all and speak about the most horrifying thing he could think of. Gielgud allegedly folded his crossword away, stepped forward and darkly intoned: "This production opens in 10 days time."

Regarding recent productions, a few critical Brits, including myself, have been irked by the air of sanctity encircling Brook and his company. In 2002, his approach was also chastised by the directly political playwright David Hare for having become, "a universal hippie babbling which represents nothing but fright of commitment". That led to an exchange of letters.

Here today in the bistro, however, he's not at all grandiose or remote. He is very sweet, twinkly and courteously asks questions rather than just holding forth. His sentences tend to head off on tangents, slightly losing the thread, but they aren't mystically abstruse. In fact, he displays a sense of humour about the mysticism. He recollects how, with would-be metaphysical resonance, he told one dervish, "In my house, I seem to hear sounds. I don't know where they come from," only for the wise man to look bewildered and suggest he should call in a builder. With Sizwe Banzi, he is also manifestly countering David Hare's rebuke by taking on a political drama, a period piece with topical resonances.

Kani and Ntshona first came to England in 1973, presenting Sizwe Banzi is Dead at the Royal Court and combining it with their other two-hander, The Island - set in the notorious Robben Island prison where Nelson Mandela and other dissidents were incarcerated. One sharp extra irony was that Kani and Ntshona, just to be allowed to travel, had to be falsely described in their passbooks as the white-writer Fugard's servants.

The Court's South African season proved a potent event, opening London theatregoers' eyes to Apartheid's injustices and, in the process, actively undermining the regime back home. Shuttling across the Channel to catch The Island, Brook considered the opening scene of mimed hard labour as "one of the most amazing theatre experiences I had ever had... this astounding stroke that knocked the audience sideways... This was with an imaginary wheelbarrow and an imaginary spade, but you could feel the muscle, the fatigue, the sweat." He has been friends with both actors ever since.

The play's remarkable humour and humane warmth, style and structure make it entertaining as well as educational. The first half is a satirical monologue, almost like stand-up, spoken by a spirited smalltime entrepreneur, called Styles, who lives in a poor black township, He recounts how he used to work at the shabbily racist Ford car factory, mimes and mimics numerous characters including his white bosses, and he tells how he changed his life by establishing his own photography studio from scratch. Next, the scene suddenly turns into a dialogue as the studio is visited by a simple soul who says he is called Sizwe Banzi. He shyly hopes to have his portrait taken in a new suit, to celebrate making a positive stride forward in his life, and Styles encourages him to play out his dreams. Then we cut back in time. The actor playing Styles morphs into a different canny and supportive local called Buntu, and we see how he has also helped Sizwe - whose real name is Robert - to take courage and forge a new personality with better prospects. The theatrical trick of doubling roles becomes a joyous analogy for everyone's capacity to reinvent themselves.

Both the London shows went on to Broadway, where Kani and Ntshona won Tony Awards. When the duo returned to their native land and performed Sizwe Banzi again in 1976, they were arrested and held in solitary confinement. However, their plight sparked protests from the alerted London theatre community and from others, exerting pressure on the South African government until they were set free after two weeks.

With Kani and Ntshona now in their sixties, their reprise of Sizwe Banzi at the National will make an interesting comparison with Brook's production which is performed (in French with surtitles) by two vigorously youthful actors - Habib Dembélé from Mali and a Congolese-Belgian rapper called Pitcho Womba Konga. Kani hopes that his own and Ntshona's acting skills have matured "like a good wine" over the years. Ntshona adds that young theatre-goers, many of whom barely remember Apartheid, have been responding with huge interest and excitement to their pre-NT performances, on tour in South Africa. He explains: "I came over to the Royal Court last year, to take part in the playreading [of Sizwe Banzi] in the their 50th-anniversary season, and that received such an overwhelming response, with a good spread of youth in the audience, that I realised there was still life in it." That said, his and Kani's Lyttelton performances will be their farewell to this play, coming back, full circle, to London to "put it to rest".

Meanwhile, Kani has been moving on as an actor-writer. Next month his post-Apartheid play, Nothing But The Truth - in which he gives a powerful central performance - will be touring the regions from Hampstead Theatre. Even if theatrically flawed, this domestic-political drama has won great acclaim in South Africa, embracing but also challenging the new system. It does this by airing how hard it is to personally forgive past wrongs even in a state where the Truth and Reconciliation Committee has admirably risen above punitive bitterness. Ntshona, for his part, has dedicated himself to nurturing promising young South African actors and playwrights, the next generation. "Mine is to look over my shoulder and see if anybody is coming who I can help," he remarks.

As for Brook, the Barbican is already in cross-Channel negotiations about another production, a new English version of his Sufi mystic biodrama, Tierno Bokar. That is scheduled for 2009. Brook clearly intends to keep using his own passport and he remarks that he is still English at heart. "I have travelled and travelled and I feel at home everywhere," he explains, "but when someone says the word 'lamp-post', I can't suddenly think of a lamp-post in East Berlin. I mean a 'lamp-post' is a lamp-post in Fairfax Road, W4. I've had French residence since 1970 and changing your nationality is just a stamp on your passport, yet it's unthinkable. I couldn't do it." Back in the Paris bistro, it's a Saturday evening, but he has been busily rehearsing through the afternoon. And is he now really going back to do some more? "Of course! I don't want to live my last years on a desert island or in a monastery. What I love most is working with people," he exclaims merrily, brushing away the breadcrumbs and making tracks.

'Sizwe Banzi is Dead', with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, runs at the NT Lyttelton, London (020 7452 3000), tomorrow to 4 April; Peter Brook's production of 'Sizwe Banzi is Dead' opens at the Barbican, London (0845 120 7500), 9 to 26 May; 'Nothing But The Truth' tours the UK starting at Northern Stage, Newcastle (0191 230 5151) on 25 April