The legendary British theater director Peter Brook died on Saturday at the age of 97, according to the French daily Le Monde.

Brook has lived in France since 1974, from which time he had run the Theater Buoffes du Nord in Paris.

Peter Stephen Paul Brook was born on March 21, 1925 in London.

His Russian Jewish parents, Simon and Ida Brook, fled Russia after the October Revolution and settled in Britain.

Brook studied at Oxford and, while still a student, brought out a production of Faust (Faust von Marlowe) with his own theater company in 1943.

It was at Birmingham's Repertory Theater that Brook first caught the attention of critics just after World War II.

He directed Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost in Stratford-upon-Avon.

From 1947 to 1950 Brook was Head of Production at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

In the 1950s he worked on stages in Belgium, Great Britain and Paris.

In 1951 he toured Germany with the Stratforder Ensemble and presented his legendary production of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure".

His own language

In 1962 Brook was promoted to director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon alongside Peter Hall.

Here, too, as he had done since the beginning of his theater work, he chose texts with a contemporary relevance.

Brook felt committed to the foundations, to the memory of theater and society.

He said goodbye to conventional theater in 1970. He ended his engagement in Stratford-upon-Avon and founded the theater research institute "Centre International de Recherches Théâtrales" (CIRT) in Paris after he had developed a (theater) language that he under first presented under the name "Orghast" at the 1971 Persepolis Festival.

"Orghast" consists of words that can be charged with immediate expression by the actor and evoke spontaneous imaginations in the listener,

in this way use the quasi pre-semantic expressive possibilities of the language.

With this, Brook created his theater, which dispensed with stage decorations and optical effects, with which he was successful to the end.

He directed until shortly before his death.

His plays always came out first at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris and then went on a world tour.

In search of a playing technique that involved the audience, Brook traveled through West Africa with his performers for several months and improvised in village squares.

According to the FAZ (July 22, 1985), his theater was "inspired by the idea of ​​a world culture".

Critics described Brooks' dramatization of the Sanskrit epic "Le Mahabharata", presented at the Avignon Theater Festival in 1985 as a milestone on this path to a new world culture was shown.

In 2008 Brook announced that he was taking over as director of the Theater Bouffes du Nord 2010, which he had co-directed with Micheline Rozan since 1974.