I must have been 16 when Peter Brook’s Hamlet came to town. Advance bookings sold out within minutes: Brook, who died this week at the age of 97, had lived in Paris since the 1970s and his occasional theatre tours to the UK were subject to insatiable demand.

So, I queued at London’s Young Vic theatre for one of 20 tickets available only on the day. Arriving at 5am, I sat on the grey pavement until the box office opened, 19 other buttock-frozen theatre obsessives waiting alongside me. Most had been there all night.

When we returned that evening to use our tickets, Brook had arranged for those who’d observed this vigil to sit cross-legged in a semi-circle at the front of his performance space with cushions and water to make us comfortable.

His actors joined us on the stage, closing our circle, and began to tell a story. This was Shakespeare’s Hamlet rendered elemental, now a simple myth of fathers and sons told by one actor to another.

With teenage scorn, I pitied the conventional audience who’d merely booked tickets like normies and sat in standard rows of seats behind us, missing out on our intimacy. Though their back muscles probably ended the evening in better shape.

Born in Chiswick to Jewish émigré parents from Latvia, Brook was an essential figure in the development of 20th- century British theatre.

Even if you’ve never seen one of his productions, you’ve seen his influence. His enemy was the stagey, pre-war theatre of convention, which he termed “deadly theatre”.

In particular, Brook was turned off by the habit of actors inhabiting traditional roles by mimicking the expected cadences and gestures that audiences had come to expect to be applied to familiar texts by Shakespeare and other canonical authors.

Beginning his directing career as an 18-year-old in 1943, Brook taught theatre practitioners to approach each classic text as if they were reading it for the very first time. This is now standard practice; then it was revolutionary. Brook talked about his Jewish heritage as “hereditary fact, not an emotional influence producing feelings of guilt, or worry or concern”.

He said of his father: “Jewishness to him had to do with religion and rabbis, and he was a modern, assimilated Englishman.”

Where his Jewishness surfaced, it was perhaps most visible in his ability to remain mischievously uncaptured by the establishment, even as he thrived intellectually on his education at Westminster School, Gresham’s and Magdalen College, Oxford.

After his early work at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, Brook shrugged off the growing clamour for him to lead a major British institution and escaped instead to Paris, away from political compromises and English snobberies. Brook’s Jewish values also influenced his determination to confront human- rights abuses across the world.

Yet he was reluctant to focus on Jewish suffering, or on the Holocaust as a unique evil.
In his seminal first book on theatre, The Empty Space, he describes asking a volunteer to read a speech from Peter Weiss’s play about Auschwitz, The Investigation.

The words came out clear and cold: “It had neither grace nor lack of grace, skill nor lack of skill — it was perfect because he had no attention to spare for self-consciousness.”

When Brook asked his volunteer to read identically a speech about another barbarism — the speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, which lists the names and numbers of the dead at Agincourt — his audience erupted with protest.

“Why could they not take the list of the dead at Agincourt as seriously as the description of death at Auschwitz?”, Brook wrote.

To be fair, Brook’s primary purpose in this exercise was fundamentally to teach a lesson about how actors work with text.

Asked to shake off his assumptions about Shakespeare as a distant figure speaking only of the past, his volunteer was finally able to speak “as vividly as if the butchery had occurred in living memory”. Auschwitz was present in his Agincourt.

But the episode also speaks to Brook’s ongoing resistance to the views of the mainstream Jewish community. In 2012, he abruptly cancelled a tour at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv on the grounds that it had taken a decision “to support the brutal action of colonisation” by touring the West Bank. Many Israelis never forgave him.

Yet the Jewish community should be proud of Brook, even if his rebellious nature sometimes made him hard for other Jews to love. His breakthrough came in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, like a Jewish Puck, he was an impish genius.