Appreciation: The radical majesty of British theater director Peter Brook

I've been fortunate to have met a number of geniuses in my years as a theater critic but only one who was a true sage.

Peter Brook, the British director who revolutionized the way Shakespeare was staged in the postwar era, never rested on his laurels. After ushering the classical British theater into the 20th century of Edward Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, he left England for France to establish the International Centre for Theatre Research, one of the most innovative groups for intercultural performance in the world, long situated at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

Indeed, Brook lived and worked in a continual state of becoming. Even in his last decades, when he might have basked in the eminence of his international reputation, he was still experimenting, still trying to separate the essential from the meretricious.

Brook's death at