The Empty Space
1968 book by Peter Brook
The Empty Space is a 1968 book by the British director Peter Brook examining four modes or points of view on theatre: Deadly; Holy; Rough; and Immediate.
The book is based on a series of four lectures endowed by Granada Television and delivered at Manchester, Keele, Hull, and Sheffield Universities in England. The first lecture, on The Deadly Theatre, was delivered on 1 February 1965 at Manchester University. The lecture series helped to fund his long-planned trip to Afghanistan.
The work was considered controversial when first published in 1968 and received mixed reviews. However, it is now widely taught in higher education theatre studies courses and is regarded as "the seminal text of modern theatre".
The Empty Space is defined by Brook as "[A]ny space in which theatre takes place." "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".
Empty Space Peter Brook Award
The Empty Space Peter Brook Award was an annual prize awarded to a theatre in recognition of pioneering concepts and innovations in theatre achieved in smaller venues and inventive spaces which receive minimal or no public funding. Award categories included regional theatres and up-and-coming theatre.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1968 book by Peter Brook. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 18, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7731981. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Empty Space” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.