Thank you for the appreciations offered for Peter Brook (Obituary, 3 July). It was especially interesting to read the experiences of the actors (‘The greatest director the world has ever seen’ – actors salute Peter Brook, 4 July). My brother and I worked with him as nine-year-olds in his film of Lord of the Flies, playing the twins “Samneric”. We were invited for a screen test that was held in a roof garden atop an apartment block in New York.
The casting director sat us down and, pointing to the garden, said that he thought there was pig hiding in there. We were asked to go into the garden, hunt it down and then “kill” it. Eventually we rooted out a jolly man in summer casuals and started to pummel him. He roared with laughter and we were introduced to Peter Brook. We got the parts and have many happy memories of the experience.
Simon Surtees
London
• Over the last few days, I have found it hard not to think about Peter Brook, partly because my father, Dugald Rankin, made me aware of him in 1954 when I was seven years old and partly because, 20 years later, Peter Brook, like Joan Littlewood, directed egg commercials for my father, then a producer at the agency Mather and Crowther. Today, this came to me.
Just after the opening of his Vietnam war play, US, at the Aldwych Theatre, Peter Brook came on the TV programme Late Night Line-Up. Opposite him was a man called Professor Honey.
Well, this professor hated the show, saying: “And they didn’t even get their facts right.” To which Peter replied: “But we approached someone to help us get our facts right, but that someone turned us down and that someone was Professor Honey.”
After that, the interviewer saying “what a coup de théâtre” seemed unnecessary.
Peter Rankin
Biographer of Joan Littlewood
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