It was enough for him: a square.

On the ground.

About the size of a room.

Often made of sand.

Sometimes when it came up, in the form of a rug.

Around a few cushions, in rare cases chairs.

But in the center: strange people.

A young man named Hamlet, for example, a curly-haired black prince, in the midst of an African-Danish royal dynasty, who made a great tragedy out of the agony of having to look at the world and load it fully into his astonished eyes - after which the world was perfect overthrown because it seemed clear (not clear!).

And the visually human theater magician Peter Brook undertook a grandiose adventure journey into the abysses of the very simplest question with Shakespeare's hero: Who is there (Qui est là)?

Who are we looking at when he answers “I” to this curious question?

"It was my brain!"

Or the very small woman;

black hair tied in pigtails;

black pants suit;

mouse-thin facial features, frightened and amused.

She has a gigantic charge of terror in her brain: doomed to memorize every number, every colour, every person, every scene, everything and to repeat it rememberingly, not to be allowed to erase anything from her memory.

And where unscrupulous brain research retreats to the guilt-unloading mantra “It's not me, it was my brain!”, the conscientious brain-researching theater examiner Peter Brook went the opposite way.

The scenic researcher, who has already dealt with the brain-damaged "Man who mistook his wife for a hat" by Oliver Sacks theatrically and who was amazed by the phenomena of displacements in the noblest and most complicated human organ, undertook with the very small woman an adventure into the abysses and into the dignity of human perception and understanding - until she understood the two little words "I want!" on the infinite continent of the incomprehensible.

And discovered her free will.

And both Hamlet in Shakespeare's Eye-Land (2002) and the very small woman in wonder-land, namely the "Valley of Astonishment" (2014), experienced great celebrations of theatrical happiness, which consists in building a world through play, living it through and to wonder through, which is not to be had anywhere else than in a room in which people come together to make a reality of what is inside a reality that eludes any reality outside.

opposed to her.

She trumps.

knocks you down.

In beauty, cruelty and absurdity.

Clever and lustfully pious

Peter Brook, the king of world theater, was the directing genius of the greatest simplicity and, along with Ariane Mnouchkine, perhaps the only world-class theater great who believed in theater almost childlike, amazed and inquiring, pure and clear, intelligent and joyfully pious.

And like Mnouchkine, the commander of the "Théâtre du Soleil" in Vincennes, he never left his theater.

Sat by night after night, taking notes, seeing his work as endless, never finished.

A small, slender man with a fringe of snow-white hair, the brightest eyes, always ready to intervene, to ask new questions.