Peter Brook's Soft Pink Pincers

 Another white box: Sally Jacobs' hugely influential set for Peter Brook's magic-redefining production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", in which my Dad played Puck. That's him stage right, in the yellow Chinese Circus bloomers and blue skullcap, entering on stilts. He also rode a trapeze and spun plates. Mum was a dresser on the show, having worked for a while at an actual circus, and that's how they met. All this was before my time of course, but as a child I still found something strangely magical about squash courts. Here's some footage.

 

 

 The Dream stayed with Dad, who always described Peter Brook as a ghost on his shoulder. Brook never shared Dad's love of Gilbert and Sullivan, for example. "Tacky." When he was just twenty-six, Dad wrote a beautiful essay about working with him which Alan Cox dug out and to sent to me the day Brook died, in July, the same month as David Warner. This is another belated In Memoriam then (and there may be a third, in which case this will be a two-parter, but also there may not). You'll notice the actor's account of the rehearsal room here differs a bit from the director's:

  "Unseen by us, Peter carefully prepared the ground for these 'revelations'... Peter could drive us to distraction by his demands for an incease in our self-awareness. He would sit down with us and shake his head in disbelief that we could have gone so far forward in one direction while taking so many steps back in another..."

 And then Dad goes on to explain how he escaped, and where he got the idea for the stilts. Click to enlarge.