The Valley of Astonishment

Following his opera Une flûte enchantée in 2011, the prominent director Peter Brook (1925) is back at the Holland Festival with The Valley of Astonishment, another collaboration with Marie-Hélène Estienne. Brook has labelled The Valley of Astonishment a 'theatrical exploration', continuing a theme which he first approached with Estienne in his production The Man Who (Holland Festival 1995). Asking the question how (different) patients with a neurological disorder perceive the world, Brook and Estienne based themselves on the work of the British writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks. Brook's position is that theatre exists to amaze us, bringing together two opposites: the normal and the exceptional. The Man Who showed us normal people who because of illness behaved abnormally and erratically and who were, until the not so distant past, labelled as insane. The performance intentionally muddles up the difference between these characters and the audience in a tragic, comic and dramatic way.

The Valley of Astonishment is, just like The Man Who, performed by four actors and a musician. It's another wonderful journey of discovery through the human brain, inspired by up-to-date insights from neurological science. However, Brook and Estienne take matters a step further this time, introducing four characters to whom music, colour, form, memories, scents and feelings evoke extremely contrasting experiences. Imagine a world in which every sound has a colour, every colour has a taste, and the number 8 is a fat lady. It's a mind-boggling performance exploring the fascinating inner world of some extraordinary people who due to their illness experience the world in a radically different way, tossed between heaven and hell from one moment to the next.

The performance is inspired by the epic, mystical poem Conference of the Birds (1177) by the famous Persian poet Farid ud-Din ‘Attar. The poem tells the story of thirty birds who are on a quest which takes them through seven valleys, each valley more dangerous and difficult to navigate than the previous one. Brook staged this Persian epic before, in 1979, but now, 35 years on, he has put the age-old story in a completely new context. In his monumental career as a theatre, opera and film director, spanning 70 odd years, Brook has always explored key philosophical questions, whether it be in the Vedic epic The Mahabharata (1985, filmed in 1989), his work with The Royal Shakespeare Company – including his influential stagings of King Lear (1962, filmed in 1969) and Marat/Sade (1964, filmed in 1967) –, his adaptation of Dostoyevsky's short story The Grand Inquisitor (2004) or his minimalist performance about the life of the African Sufi mystic Tierno Bokar and his message of religious tolerance (Holland Festival 2005). Brooke has always been fascinated by people who experience things in their full intensity – the insane, the fanatic, the infirm – and The Valley of Astonishment is no exception to the rule, asking questions such as 'what do we really experience?' and 'does everyone in this world experience things in the same way?

The Valley of Astonishment brings together two strands that Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne have been exploring for many years: Islamic mysticism and the neurology of the human brain. The performance takes the audience along on a kaleidoscopic search through the mountains and valleys of the human brain. Reaching the sixth valley, the valley of astonishment, our feet tread steadily on the ground, but with each step we penetrate into the unknown.