the empty space: a book about the theatre: deadly, holy, rough, immediate

Cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of the International Center for Theater Research in Paris, perhaps Brook's greatest legacy will be The Empty Space. The book contains the first-time publication of the play 'Signed with Blood, or: Bloody Nathan,' an adaptation of Lessing's poem by the renowned Israeli dramatist, Joshua Sobol.Peter Brook's career, beginning in the 1940s with radical productions of Shakespeare with a modern experimental sensibility and continuing to his recent work in the worlds of opera and epic theater, makes him perhaps the most influential director of the 20th century. Describing the personal stories underlying productions by Shimon Finkel, Joseph Zur, Joshua Sobol, and Doron Tavory, this original research offers insight into over forty years of Israeli history and its changing relationships with Germany and Austria. Through personal interviews, hitherto inaccessible archive material, and the study of a broad range of documents and articles, it presents a fascinating overview of the reception of 'Nathan the Wise' in Israel. According to the Israeli theatre scholar Gad Kaynar, ?there is hardly anything more absurd than to speak about the reception of Lessing in Israel,? (Lessing Yearbook 2000). Written on the eve of the French Revolution, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's dramatic poem 'Nathan the Wise' became a paradigm for modern Jewish identity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and Eastern Europe.

The empty space: a book about the theatre: deadly, holy, rough, immediate