Peter Brook's The Conference Of The Birds

In 1977 writer and theatre critic John Heilpern wrote a book he called Conference of the Birds, telling the story of director Peter Brook’s journey into the Sahara in the early 1970s in order to create a new form of theatre that would completely distance itself from any cultural assumptions of its audience. Brook and theatre artists from the Centre international de recherche théâtrale performed their pieces for the native populations in Africa with whom they shared neither language nor culture. One of the pieces in their repertoire was based on the 12th century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds by Farid al-Din Attar (منطق الطیر, Mantiqu 't-Tayr). Among Brook’s international troupe of actors were a young Helen Mirren and a middle-aged Yoshi Oida, better known in his native Japan. If Peter Brook’s journey was a success, I cannot say, but the subsequent productions in New York and Paris clearly were. Strangely, however, this kind of success seems to directly contradict the motivation of the exercise, since audiences in both Paris and New York would for the most part share the language and culture of the performers. …show more content…
The birds are informed by the hoope bird that this king, the great single creator of all existence, is called Simorgh. Yet the birds, one by one, fall short of completing the impossibly long journey to reach Simorgh, each failing within itself differently, revealing a personal flaw that would serve as the needed exemption for giving up. Eventually, however, a small group does manage to arrive – precisely thirty birds – and yet, mistaken in their pursuit, they do not find a king as they thought they would. They find no other being, that is to say, they do not find Simorgh as they imagined, as their god, but what they find is the stark and crystalline reflection of themselves in a glorious