The celebrated theater director Peter Brook says that when he was a boy attending a play, even the most dazzling sets weren’t as compelling as what his imagination could suggest while he was watching.
Suggestive power is what’s being sought in “The Tightrope,” filmed by Brook’s son, Simon, as a record of his 87-year-old father’s unique rehearsal process. A group of actors with a range of bodies and ages walk across an imaginary tightrope, trying to unlock what the director calls “a certain link between the pure imagination and the body itself.”
Brook is after physical and emotional moments that will “hold our attention,” he says — not naturalism and certainly not mime. Most of the players come up with moves that would be catastrophic on a real tightrope. Brook is measured, whimsical — a guru, not a firebrand.
It is a one-set movie, focused largely on keeping the actors in frame, and definitely requires a certain patience with misty stage theories. But even a lay audience can soon see which actors are phony and which are fully present; which choices are interesting, and which are not. The way the tightrope works is vague, but what the exercise shows is straightforward and marvelous.