Estienne

In 2012 he became an assistant to the revered director Peter Brook and his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and started teaching at the London acting school East 15, where he began developing the hyper-real style of the “Inequalities” trilogy.

The actor Kathryn Hunter heard the news of the director Peter Brook’s death, last weekend at 97, in a telephone call from his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne.

In 2019 he premiered a new play, “Why?,” about experimental Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, which Mr. Brook wrote and staged with Estienne.

For decades, he worked there with his chief lieutenant, Marie-Hélène Estienne, staging classics like Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” while also working on new productions such as his adaptation of the “Mahabharata,” a key Hindu text and foundation work of South Asian literature.

Mr. Brook acknowledged that the play “would never have existed without India” but defended his interpretation of the text, returning to the source material in 2016 with “Battlefield,” a four-character play that he directed and wrote with Estienne.