Notes toward enjoying Peter Brook’s misunderstood new version of Hamlet , currently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music:
It is a landmark production of the most hackneyed great play in history precisely because it compels us to see it with utterly fresh eyes. The fine Polish critic Jan Kott–an influence on Brook’s early work–wrote memorably Read More
The celebrated and reviled Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski
was a fantasist in a good cause-namely, art and himself. He’s a fascinating
subject for a play, which is, of course, another good cause and fantastic
illusion.
On the one hand, Kosinski’s award-winning 1965
autobiographical novel of the Holocaust, The
Painted Bird, made him a literary Read More
Jean-Claude Carrière, the distinguished author of La Terrasse –a typical French farce about a typical New York obsession, apartment hunting–is a dramatist who needs masters.
He is at his storytelling best as the longtime collaborator of Peter Brook and Luis Buñuel. Mr. Carrière has written only four original plays. But he wrote six of Buñuel’s Read More
What if they gave a party for Shakespeare’s birthday and nobody came? Hard to believe in this moment of Bardic hype, with Shakespeare in Love , Shakespeare in Bloom and all that. Could it be that the sudden fad for things Shakespearean has all the depth and seriousness of one of those revolting Renaissance Faires? Read More
