Peter Brook, a two-time Tony-winner, an Emmy-winner, Olivier Award, and recipient of distinguished honors for his contributions to the arts from Great Britain, France, Spain, India, and the United States, died on Saturday in Paris, as confirmed by his assistant. Brook was known for radical adaptations of Shakespeare, his theater treatise The Empty Space, the English-language production of Marat/Sade, directing the film version of Lord of the Flies, and the nine-hour (more with breaks!) adaptation of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. He was 97 years old.

The London-born, Paris-based director was described as “an almost mystical figure often mentioned in the same breath as Konstantin Stanislavsky,” in an obituary by Agence France-Presse. He collaborated with iconic performers like Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Paul Scofield, John Gielgud, and Glenda Jackson. He also worked with Ben Kingsley and Patrick Stewart early in their careers, and Helen Mirren joined his International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris in the early 1970s. 

The son of Latvian-Jewish immigrants to London, Brook was a prodigy, making his professional debut at 17, a production of Doctor Faustus in 1943. From 1947 to 1950, he was director of productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. A production of Salome featured set design by Salvador Dalí. He later directed operas for the Metropolitan Opera and the Aix en Provence Festival.

In 1953 he made his first film, The Beggar’s Opera, a Technicolor musical based on the 18th-century opera by John Gay. It starred Laurence Olivier, Stanley Holloway, and Dorothy Tutin. In 1960 he directed the French drama Seven Days … Seven Nights, for which Jeanne Moreau won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1963, he directed what is likely his most lasting film, the adaptation of William Golding’s dark novel, shot on location in Puerto Rico. 

In 1964, however, his adaptation of the play-within-a-play Marat/Sade became a sensation. British Furor Over ‘Filth’ read a headline in The New York Times concerning its premiere in a season that also included Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane. The production came to New York (starring Glenda Jackson, Ian Richardson, and Patrick Magee), and won the Tony Award for Best Play as well as the Best Director prize for Brook. (He had previously been nominated for directing Elizabeth Seal in Irma La Douce, and Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt in The Visit.)

Brook directed a film version of Marat/Sade (a project which, should you ever want to conquer a theater-based bar trivia night, has a full title of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade) in 1967.

In 1970, two years after publishing his influential book The Empty Space, Brook’s direction of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a flashpoint in modern theater. Brook staged the then-365-year-old play in a blank white cube, incorporating trapeze artists and actors on stilts using unusual noisemakers. When it came to Broadway, it won Brook his second Tony Award.  

In 1971 he decided to further break down barriers, staging productions "in the villages of West Africa and the deserts of Iran,” becoming a mix of “a shaman and a showman,” as The Guardian put it. (Brook maintained a love of unexpected locations for his work throughout his life; a 2008 production of The Mahabharata, 11 hours from end-to-end, took place in a rock quarry outside of Avignon.)

His company, the International Centre for Theatre Research, based out of Paris’s Bouffes du Nord Theatre, remains a bastion of experimental work, presenting material from new writers as well as recontextualized classics. He won an Emmy in 1984 for directing an adaptation of La Tragedie de Carmen and an International Emmy in 1990 for a mini-series of Mahabharata. In addition to The Empty Space, he wrote two more books about theater, as well as an autobiography. His simple solution for how to keep theater relevant for modern audiences was “cheap seats.”

His other film work includes a 1968 meditation on the Vietnam War, Tell Me Lies, starring a slew of British notables like Kingsley Amis and Peggy Ashcroft (it was intended to debut at the famously canceled May ‘68 iteration of the Cannes Film Festival); a 1970 adaptation of King Lear with Paul Scofield; and a 1977 adaptation of philosopher-composer G.I. Gurdjieff’s non-fiction work Meetings With Remarkable Men, shot in Afghanistan with Terence Stamp, Athol Fugard, and Andrew Kier, among others. He also co-wrote the screenplay (with Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne) for Volker Schlöndorff's adaptation of Marcel Proust's Swann in Love with Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti, Fanny Ardant, and Alain Deloin. In 2002, he shot a television film of The Tragedy of Hamlet with Adrian Lester in the lead role. 

He continued to work into his 10th decade, writing and directing the play The Prisoner in 2018 (it ran in London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Brooklyn), the play Why? in Brooklyn in 2019, and staging The Tempest Project, “a play stemming from a research on The Tempest by William Shakespeare” earlier this year. 

In a recent interview with NPR, he was asked about the title of his first book, The Empty Space. “I sometimes say to people, 'don't bother to read the book, read the title,'" he said, somewhat counter-intuitively. “This is a call to a question, to say why? And bit by bit get rid of all the established trappings of scenery, of costume, of music. All that has to be questioned.”