Additional performance of Peter Brook’s Why? at FTA 2020
Montreal, Monday, March 17, 2020 – In response to popular demand, the FTA team is pleased to announce a fourth performance of Why? on Saturday, May 23 at 8 p.m. at the Monument National during the 14th edition of Festival TransAmériques. This is a unique opportunity to see a testamentary, probing work by the uncontested master of contemporary theatre Peter Brook, who at 95 questions the very foundations of theatre and the reasons for devoting his life to it. Why do theatre at all? Why go to the theatre?
About the show
At the apogee of his impressive career, the illustrious director Peter Brook, along with his colleague Marie-Hélène Estienne, divests the theatre of artifice to ask an essential question: Why?
On an almost completely bare stage three exceptional actors dismantle the mechanics of theatre, revealing with incredible simplicity how their art is constructed. They then summon the heroic figure of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold. A fervent early 20th century revolutionary deeply committed to the cause, he changed the concept of stage presence with a new form of theatre that was playful, radical and even dangerous, until Stalin, in the name of the revolution, had him executed. Why believe in the truth of theatre if it means your own death? Why?
“As soon as you leave the realm of conventional, realistic theatre, traces of Meyerhold are everywhere. Like his contemporaries Stanislavski and Artaud, he was deeply involved in a quest for what is true in life. No question of turning theatre into a mysterious illusion. He dispensed with the curtain, showed the backstage area, the projectors. He developed a way for the actor to think and to articulate the work of the body – his biomechanical system. In fact, he viewed theatre as ‘very dangerous weapon.”
— Peter Brook
May 21 to 23
Monument-National – Salle Ludger-Duvernay
1 h 15
Tickets on sale now
May 21 + 22 at 8 p.m. + May 23 at 3 p.m.
In English with French surtitles
