Brook Brings Redux Hamlet to Young Vic, 22 Aug

Brook Brings Legendary director Peter Brook will return to London – and more particularly, the Young Vic – for a second time this year. His acclaimed reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, re-titled The Tragedy of Hamlet, will have a strictly limited season at the off-West End venue from 22 August to 8 September 2001.

The run follows last month’s outing of Brook’s production of Can Themba’s South African township piece, Le Costume (The Suit), which played to rave reviews at the Young Vic for ten performances only. The August engagement for The Tragedy of Hamlet will comprise the production’s only performances in this country.

Now on an international tour, The Tragedy of Hamlet premiered last year in Paris, where the British Brook has been based since the 1970s. Controversially, he has cut more than a third from Shakespeare’s original text and reduced the cast to just eight.

The cast of The Tragedy of Hamlet is led by Briton Adrian Lester in the title role. The acclaimed young black actor's stage credits include Six Degrees of Separation and Company while, on film, he has appeared in Primary Colours, Love's Labour's Lost and Maybe Baby.

Peter Brook, now in his 70s, is one of Britain's most revered theatre directors, renowned for his experimental re-workings of classic texts. In the 1960s, he enjoyed a long association with the RSC, but by the early 1970s, Brook had moved towards an unconventional style which was often considered out of place at subsidised British theatres and in the West End. In 1971, he established the International Centre of Theatre Research (CIRT) in Paris, which remains his base.

Brook's many notable successes include celebrated productions of King Lear, Marat/Sade, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Cherry Orchard and Carmen. On screen, he is best known for directing the 1963 film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

- by Terri Paddock

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