The Théâtre National de Nice's new director is natural, impassioned and direct. She advocates high-quality theatre for all audiences, accessible to youngsters and open to the world.
Irina Brook grew up with her father's very experimental theatre of the 70s. "As a child I went on all sorts of trips discovering other cultures. We'd go off to African villages and roll out a mat on the ground as the stage," she remembers. The daughter of famous director Peter Brook and actress Natasha Parry dreamed a time of becoming a movie star and after studying drama with Stella Adler in New York played in several films. Now, from the maturity of her 50 years, she looks back to that time with a smile: "For 10 years I struggled so hard to be normal! And then I discovered Jacques Lecoq's physical theatre based on the actors' body language and I knew what I wanted to do." The shy, soft-eyed and rather reserved blonde then signed up for the kind of physically extrovert courses that had previously terrified her, and so reconnected with a part of her childhood, the feeling that everything is possible, the sense of freedom.
Awards for directing
In the 90s the life of this versatile artist took a major new turn when she discovered a vocation for directing with her first production, of Richard Kalinoski's Beast on the Moon, the French adaptation of which won her five Molière awards. Brook's repertoire includes Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan and her own versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Familiar with the iconic English playwright since childhood, having learnt her first lines from his plays and spent a summer working as an usher at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Franco-British Brook believes: "All his plays should be retranslated." Because: "Shakespeare is about standing in the Globe Theatre's pit, the greatest playwright at street level, top-quality theatre for the masses. It works in Arabic, Russian, Japanese... it needs to in French." Unsurprising to find Shakespeare on the programme she has worked out for this autumn's Shake Nice festival!
Music, dance, circus
A few years back, if anyone had suggested she might head a national drama centre, this unclassifiable professional who always speaks her mind would have shot back: "No, never! I don't want to be imprisoned in a structure, I want to continue to be free with my company." But for the little girl who was forever saying things were "nice", coming to the so-named city seemed like an omen. Appointed to run the TNN in January, she started the summer in strong style by touring the city with An Odyssey after Homer, one of her Irina’s DreamTheatre company's long-standing shows, to bring theatre into the streets. "We were crazy enough to improvise it at the last minute, which can be stressful for those unused to it. But our encounters with the public were magical." Rather than calling on well-known names, Brook prefers to make the work of all her actors the focal point. Her theatre is colourful, keen on international collaborations and regional companies. Nourished by a sincere idealism, it celebrates humanity, "its fragility, its violence, its beauty", to create a generous experience. www.tnn.fr
By Tanja Stojanov
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