Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski: the empty space and the holy theatre, the poor theatre stripped of all but the actor-audience relationship, physical and vocal training, and theatre as a charged, essential encounter.

What this dot point is asking

Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski both stripped theatre back to its essentials. Brook's idea of the empty space holds that theatre needs nothing but an actor crossing a bare space while someone watches. Grotowski's poor theatre rejects elaborate set, lighting and costume, concentrating everything on the actor's body and voice and the charged relationship with the audience, supported by rigorous physical and vocal training. OCR lists both as practitioners for the devising component. The skill is to apply this stripped-back, actor-centred approach to make theatre with almost nothing, not to describe a bare stage for its own sake.

The answer

Brook and Grotowski asked what theatre cannot do without, and answered: the actor and the audience. Everything else is optional. Their approach is a discipline of subtraction, removing spectacle so the live encounter becomes intense and essential. Examiners reward candidates who make meaning from almost nothing, not those who describe an empty stage and then fill it with design.

The empty space

Brook's empty space is the founding idea: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to take place." The principle focuses the theatre maker on the essentials: the actor's presence and action, and the relationship with the watching audience. The space becomes whatever the actor and the audience's imagination make it.

The poor theatre

Grotowski's poor theatre deliberately rejects the "rich" theatre of elaborate sets, lighting, sound and costume. What remains is the actor, rigorously trained in body and voice, in a direct, charged relationship with the audience, often reconfiguring the space so the audience is close and implicated. The poverty is a discipline: by removing the inessential, the theatre concentrates its power on the human encounter.

Training and transformation

Both practitioners demand rigorous physical and vocal work. The actor's instrument, the body and voice, must be capable of transformation and intensity, because it carries the whole performance. The audience's imagination is trusted to complete what the actor suggests, so a single performer and a bare space can conjure a world.

Examples in context

A devised piece in this style might place a single performer in a bare space, the audience close on all sides. With only their body and voice, the performer becomes in turn a frightened child, the adult they grew into, and the parent they fear becoming, transforming through precise physical and vocal shifts. The space becomes a home, a street, a memory, conjured entirely by the actor and completed by the audience's imagination. The intensity comes from the closeness and the human transformation, not from any set. That is the empty space and the poor theatre at work, an approach that shares Artaud's trust in the non-verbal but seeks essential intimacy rather than sensory assault.

Try this

Q1. State Brook's principle of the empty space. [2 marks]

• Cue. Any bare space becomes a stage the moment a person crosses it while another watches; theatre needs only the actor and the audience.

Q2. What does Grotowski's poor theatre reject, and what does it concentrate on instead? [2 marks]

• Cue. It rejects elaborate set, lighting, sound and costume, concentrating on the actor's trained body and voice and a charged, direct relationship with the audience.

Q3. As a director, explain how you would apply the empty space and the poor theatre to a devised extract. [10 marks]

• What the marker wants. A stripped-back, actor-centred staging that makes meaning from the body, voice and space, rigorous physical and vocal choices, a charged actor-audience relationship, trust in the audience's imagination, and each choice tied to the essential encounter it creates rather than to spectacle.

A note on application

This guide is AI-written and not individually human-reviewed. This approach applies chiefly to devised and stripped-back staging; never contradict the poor theatre with lavish design, because examiners reward meaning made from the actor and the space. Confirm the current practitioner list against OCR's materials.