From: guardian.co.uk Sent: Friday, April 20, 2012 10:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [From: Caroline Lang] Rich simplicity from Peter Brook Caroline Lang spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you should see it. Note from Caroline Lang: About The Playstation I saw this evening. Will play I believe again sometime in May in London To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2001/jan/26/theatre.artsfeatures1 Rich simplicity from Peter Brook Le Costume Young Vic, London Michael Billington Friday January 26 2001 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2001/jan/26/theatre.artsfeatures1 "Cultivate simplicity," was Lamb's advice to Coleridge. It's also a good precept for a director. Over the years Peter Brook has taken it so to heart that his focus now is on the tale rather than the teller. Yet behind the resonant strangeness of this South African fable, jointly presented by the Young Vic and the London international festival of theatre, you sense Brook's controlling intelligence. The Suit, by South African writer Can Themba, was first dramatised for the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon, and it is this version that is now played in French with English surtitles. Set in the teeming township of Sophiatown in the 1950s, it tells of a young married couple, Philemon and Matilda. One day Philemon is told that his wife is having an affair. lie catches her in flagrante and scares off her lover, who leaves behind his suit. Matilda's punishment is to be ever reminded of the suit, which sits with the pair at suppertimes, is taken for Sunday walks and is fatally deployed by Philemon as a humiliating symbol of his wife's sin. Themba's tale has the spiky potency of a story from the Decameron: it deals with lust, penitence and a tragic failure of forgiveness. Its theatrical power also stems from its vivid evocation of time and place. S