The Empty Space by Peter Brook

of bodies inside a gas chamber. As the volunteer took the paper and read it over to himself the audience tittered in the way an audience always does when it sees one of its kind on the way to making a fool of himself. But the volunteer was too struck and too appalled by what he was reading to react with the sheepish grins that are also customary. Something of his seriousness and concentration reached the audience and it fell silent. Then at my request he began to read out loud. The very first words were loaded with their own ghastly sense and the reader’s response to them. Immediately the audience understood. It became one with him, with the speech—the lecture room and the volun- teer who had come on. to the platform vanished from sight the naked evidence from Auschwitz was so powerful that it took over completely. Not only did the reader continue to speak in a shocked attentive silence, but his reading, techni- cally speaking, was perfect—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, for wondering whether he was using the right intonation. He knew the audience wanted to hear, and he wanted to let them hear: the images found their own level and guided his voice unconsciously to the appropriate volume and pitch. After this, I asked for another volunteer, and gave him the speech from Henry V which lists the names and numbers of the French and English dead. When he read this aloud, all