Peter Brook to hand over his theatre

Revolutionary stage director Peter Brook is, at 83, finally to hand over the reins of his Parisian theatre, the Bouffes du Nord. The octogenarian, arguably the most influential stage director alive, has long raged against the idea of retirement. But he has now announced that the theatre's day-to-day running will be taken over by a new generation of directors from 2011.

"Everyone says something has been created almost invisibly in this theatre over 34 years," he says. "A lot of thought went into what would be the proper continuity. I didn't want to just place someone here and say, 'Here, take over'. I never talked about retirement as retirement is something forced on you by the state if you are unfortunate enough to work for the state. This has always been a private theatre."

Brook won international acclaim for his 1955 staging of Titus Andronicus, with Laurence Oliver in the title role. In 1962, at Stratford, he directed Paul Scofield as Lear - voted years later in a poll of RSC luminaries the greatest performance ever in a Shakespeare play.

Ever since those early days Brook has worked to push the boundaries of theatre, paring productions to their essentials, playing with staging and tackling projects as diverse as William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the Indian epic the Mahabharata, and the works of Samuel Beckett.

He is eager that his theatre continues to evolve. "The thing I wanted
to establish, having spent all my life fighting tradition and saying that theatre must be in a state of evolution, was to avoid [appointing] a successor who would try and prove my line." Regarding what he had learnt in the course of his career, he added: "You never ask yourself what you have learned... only what are the circumstances which are different from last year, in that way you can apply last year's lessons. As in Hamlet's last lines: 'The readiness is all'."