Acclaimed Director Peter Brook Talks About the Suit, Playing This Week at OZ

May 22, 2014 By Martin Brady Acclaimed director Peter Brook talks about The Suit, playing this week at OZ Billed as "a destination for innovative contemporary art experiences," OZ Nashville has not disappointed in its inaugural season. The alternative venue — a renovated cigar warehouse — offers high-style ambience and hosts performances and installations across all artistic disciplines. OZ's first presentation for the garden-variety theatergoer, The Suit, debuts this week, though there's very little that's ordinary about the piece, which is concluding an ambitious two-year international tour in Music City. The Suit has been acclaimed across the globe, and has received raves from critics in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Based on the late South African writer Can Themba's powerful novella, the play centers on Philomen, a middle-class black lawyer in apartheid-era South Africa who catches his wife, Matilda, having an affair. In haste, her lover leaves behind his clothes, and as her punishment, Philemon makes Matilda treat her lover's suit as an honored houseguest, even to the point of including it at the dinner table or taking it out for walks. Making this singular event even more noteworthy, it's under the direction of Peter Brook, a world giant of theatrical innovation. "First of all, in the thousands of plays and novels about marital betrayal, you'll find something amazing, but The Suit presents a new situation that happens with a different combination of ingredients," says Brook, speaking by phone from Paris, where he creates for the stage under the aegis of his company, Thèâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Originally adapted for the theater by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon of Johannesburg's Market Theatre in the early 1990s, The Suitwas then translated into French for Brook's original staging with longtime collaborator Marie-Helene Etienne in 1994. This 2012 English-language adaptation re- establishes Themba's bittersweet tale of the wages of infidelity, with the production enhanced significantly by composer and musical director Franck Krawcyzk, who incorporates arrangements of South African songs, African- American blues, Schubert, Bach and even "The Blue Danube." "The theater must always be familiar and surprising at the same time," says Brook, remarkably focused and passionate at 89. "Here is a surprising work that comes from an author who grew up in a country where there was nothing but oppression. Themba had a unique talent. Had he survived, he might have achieved on the level of Chekhov." Themba's work was banned under apartheid in his native South Africa, and he went into exile in Swaziland. After struggles with alcohol, he died at 43 before his best work was discovered. "One might consider that this particular dramatic situation would never come from the mind of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov or any of the great American writers," Brook says. "It's a reflection on a tiny scale of the oppression of a jealous husband, inflicting pain on his wife. He creates his own apartheid — sweet, light, gentle to outside appearances — but in fact an apartheid in which she in the end is destroyed. "The husband's oppressive thinking is completely conditioned by the life he is living and the pressures on him every minute of the day. The play offers extraordinary theoretical, political and activist overtones that in my mind could only emerge in the imagination of a writer who was living under those conditions." A compact 75-minute one-act, The Suit is a show of modest physical scope and simple set pieces, starring three actors — Jordan Barbour, Ivanno Jeremiah, Nonhlanhla Kheswa — and featuring onstage musicians Arthur Astier (guitar), Mark Christine (piano) and Mark Kavuma (trumpet). Yet Brook's genius for form and movement, and the play's important musical component, conspire to produce something more complex — what San Francisco Chronicle theater critic Robert Hurwitt called "blithely comic, deeply moving, curiously cruel and enchantingly musical." "South African music was used solely in the first production," says Brook. "This time we used a mixture of musical styles from different time periods. And yet there's no sense of anachronism, because the music always provides what the human relationships demand." Brook's associate Etienne has been working with him for 40 years."You never know with Peter what he's going to do next," she says via trans-Atlantic telephone. "Each day is interesting." Almost lost in the shuffle of Brook's history-making directorial career on the stage — which includes landmarks such as Marat/Sade and major mountings for the Royal Shakespeare Company — is his work as a film director. His 13 movies include the unforgettable Lord of the Flies (1963) and 1971'sKing Lear starring Paul Scofield. Meanwhile, he's recently published a fascinating book about Shakespeare (The Quality of Mercy) and is also the subject of a revealing 2014 documentary, The Tightrope, which profiles the master's approach to working with actors. "I always encourage this," Brook says about his craft: "Start with excess — too many elements, too many ideas, too much décor — and gradually one finds that nothing is more complete than the human being. And so as the humanity develops, bit by bit you'll find all sorts of things ... and possibly require less and less scenery." So it is with The Suit, a study in simplicity that blends whimsy with pathos and strives to haunt theatergoers with its daring musical choices and dark sociopolitical undertones. http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/acclaimed-director-peter-brook-talks-about- the-suit-playing-this-week-at-oz/Content?oid=4171681 .

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