A bigger stage for Peter Brook

Brook took the fierce visions of another theatrical pioneer, the periodically crazy French actor and director Antonin Artaud, as the basis of Theatre of Cruelty, his experimental season in which Glenda Jackson played Christine Keeler and transformed herself before our eyes into the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy.

He took great glee in wrong-footing audiences, shocking them out of a complacent "cultural" response. His 1968 Old Vic staging of Seneca's Oedipus plumbed the sexual darkness of incest as Oedipus (John Gielgud) slept with his mother, Jocasta (Irene Worth), and put his eyes out as a self-punishment.

His mother committed suicide, impaling herself on a downstage pyramidal spike. At which point Brook upended the tragedy by bringing on a massive phallus, followed by a New Orleans jazz band.

As the hushed audience watched the giant erection settle into place, the ringing voice of Coral Browne, one of British theatre's wittiest actresses, was heard from the stalls enquiring: "Anyone we know, dear?" To the predictable cries of outrage, Brook calmly explained that this ending was in the spirit of the satyr plays with which the classical theatre used to send up their grave tragedies, and that the phallus was a reminder of fertility among the carnage.

By now, Brook could have virtually written his own ticket for whatever he wanted to do next in the British theatre. Instead, he announced that he was leaving London for Paris, to start an international group of actors.

He wanted, he said, to see if theatre could be made without a shared language, without common references, far from buildings called theatres, with their pre-formed expectations and conventions. After a year's improvisation with bamboo sticks, cardboard boxes and fragments of script, he took his group to Persia (as it then was) and made an event drawn from ancient myths in a language invented by the poet Ted Hughes.

Then they went to Africa and unrolled carpets in tiny villages which had never seen theatre, and then to California, where they worked with Mexican-American actors.

On his return to Paris he semirestored a derelict theatre behind the Gare du Nord, rechristened it Bouffes du Nord, and in its scarred and paint-spattered space created 30 years of compelling, sensuous and restlessly questioning work.

Why did he leave? Peter Hall begged him for a stay of execution, so he might raise the funds and find the space for Brook to conduct his experiment in London. But Brook was adamant. He needed to clear his decks, to cast off what he could do easily and make a fresh start.

Explanations for his departure abound. French cultural policy, it is said, supports the creative individual, whereas British arts funding goes to institutions. Brook told me that a major reason for moving to Paris, where he had been working regularly for 15 years, was to be near an octogenarian woman called Jeanne de Salzmann.

She was the leading exponent of the teachings of Georges Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher and sage whose work Brook had been following, to see more clearly into himself and the world. Although he went on to make a film about Gurdjieff, this too does not seem a sufficient reason for his uprooting.

I think there are more down-toearth reasons. One day Brook said to me: "If I'd have stayed in London, I'd have just done one play after another." There is a sense in which he would have used up all his experiences of theatre in Britain.

He no longer needed to shock the audience with cruelty, nudity or madness but to take them with him into realms of theatre he had only glimpsed. He needed to turn theatre into a kind of space-probe into ultimate human questions. And in a world that was becoming globalised, he needed to make a cosmopolitan theatre with a multi-ethnic group.

Thirty-five years later, he can look back at a torrent of inventive, challenging and ravishing work, from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and The Tempest to the Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds; from the mighty Mahabharata, India's epic of war, fate and just action, to The Suit, a tiny story from the South African townships; from a passionate retrieval of Bizet's Carmen, stripped of its melodramatic accretions, to spare chamber-plays about the human brain.

Tomorrow, another sliver of Brook's late-period theatre comes to the Barbican: Ta Main dans la Mienne (Your Hand in Mine), based on the letters of Chekhov and his wife, Olga Knipper, a piece as poised as a Schubert lied.

It's hard, from London, not to project on to Brook the aura of a guru, who descends on his native city for tantalisingly brief visits. Coming up to his 80th year - and dreading the fuss that will be made of him - he reiterates his dislike of this label: "One of India's least useful exports," he said, "is the word guru."

There is nothing grand or self-inflating about the man: rather, he is a focused, impassive listener who is fired by a passionate search for deeper and truer theatre.

Michael Kustow's biography of Peter Brook is published by Bloomsbury in March. Ta Main dans la Mienne is at the Barbican (0845 1207 550) from tomorrow until 12 February.