The Empty Space

Professor Little has several times referred to Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space” and explored the idea of how a growing sense of existential nothingness manifest itself throughout Shakespeare’s later plays.
Peter Brook’s book is based on a series of four lectures is concerned with all aspects of theatre performance, but in the chapter named “The Holy Theatre” he focuses on the theatrical experience as ritual and how it can be argued that theatre is only meaningful as long as it fulfill this role and function as a mirror that somehow expose us to a deeper, perhaps painful truth about our lives.
Though Peter Brooks is speaking about Samuel Beckett in the following quote, from Professor Little’s many examples of conflicting hope and disillusionment in Shakespeare’s drama, it seems to me to be an interesting way of thinking of the plays we have read:
“Beckett’s dark plays are plays of light, where the desperate object created is witness to the ferocity of the wish to bear witness to the truth. Beckett does not say ‘no’ with satisfaction; he forges his merciless ‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn.
There are two ways of speaking about the human condition: there is the process of inspiration – by which all the positive elements of life can be revealed, and there is the process of honest vision – by which the artist bears witness to whatever it is that he has seen. The first process depends on revelation; it can’t be bought about by holy wishes. The second one depends on honesty, and it mustn’t be clouded over by holy wishes” (p. 65).
Quote from:
Brooks, Peter, The Empty Space. London: Penguin Books, 1988

Susanne Wejp-Olsen