Peter Brook: a biography Michael Kustow Bloomsbury, 334pp, £25 ISBN 0747576467

Like him or loathe him, Peter Brook has always been the ultimate "seeker" on the road of alternative theatre. For true believers, his lack of compromise is a sign of his integrity, his theatrical journey a kind of legendary pilgrimage. But one of the great strengths of Michael Kustow's biography is its separation of man from myth. While this is a fascinating portrait of Brook's unending creativity, it is also full of human detail.

Born in 1925, Brook was the son of Russian Jewish emigres who spoke Russian at home. His early experiences with the British class system, in particular the "negative and disparaging attitudes" of the educational establishment, played their part in his decision to quit the country in the 1970s. As he later recalled: "I felt myself at once English and not English at all." His childhood was also, perhaps, the spur for his precocious and freethinking talent, which took him from staging a puppet version of Hamlet at the age of ten to conquering the West End in his twenties. Meetings with Alfred Hitchcock and collaborations with Truman Capote and George Balanchine quickly followed, as did the staging of Hamlet in Moscow and Durrenmatt's Visit in New York.

In 1960, Brook declared himself "fed up with theatre", and spent two years making a film of Lord of the Flies. He abandoned written narrative and used improvisation for the project, reaching, Kustow suggests, a defining moment in his search for authenticity. Brook was looking for levers to prise open the box in which theatre had, as Arthur Miller said, "hermetically sealed itself". Influenced by American-style "happenings", Brook experimented, in works such as Marat/Sade and US, with turning theatre into event. Throughout this period, which culminated in the legendary RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he remained scornful of "English milk-and-water attitudes", which demanded "a point of view", as opposed to an "authentic" experience.

Whenever something is claimed as authentic, the English immediately seek to authenticate it. Brook, it was suggested, had no real "engagement" in the politics of the period. Charles Marowitz, initially an enthusiastic collaborator, later acidly remarked: "One way to transcend criticism is to create an artefact so unique that conventional criteria cannot be applied to it." Even Brook appeared disparaging of his younger self, recalling how, in the late 1950s and 1960s, he had been fuelled by "a driving sexuality". To go "sweeping through like this", he said, reflected "a lack of understanding and imagination".

In 1970, with the world of theatre at his feet, Brook left England for Paris. Around this time, he was becoming increasingly interested in the teachings of the Russian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. The move to Paris, Kustow contends, was partly motivated by a desire to be near the great Gurdjieff teacher Jeanne de Salzmann.

There followed epic journeys to Persia and through Africa, and a restless questioning that resulted in extraordinary works such as The Ik, The Conference of the Birds and The Mahabharata. In this period of Brook's career, streams of meaning began to converge. The nature of his subject matter was reflected in a lucidity and simplicity of form, in his casting of actors of different cultures, in his choice of texts from all over the world, and in his decision to stage productions in villages or schools, or simply on the street.

Yet Kustow never loses a grip on the other side of Brook - the commercial failures, the shows that didn't work, the continuing sense of opposition to the "establishment". There was a difficult return to the RSC in 1978 to direct Antony and Cleopatra, with Glenda Jackson. And a new, younger theatrical establishment emerged, led by David Hare, who as rec-ently as 2002 accused Brook of "draining plays of any specific meaning or context to a point where each became the same play - a universal hippie babbling which represents nothing but fright of commitment". Hare's criticism stung Brook into an exchange of letters that here reveal a surprising vulnerability. Kustow makes use of other materials from Brook's life, including his candid, funny and touching correspondence with a boyhood friend, Robert Facey, whom he met at the school he so hated.

Brook's journey emerges as anything but serene. Turbulent struggle involves hard battles; battles imply wounds. It takes courage to dispense with what has gone, to slough off the known in favour of the unknown, over and over again. The themes running through Brook's work are central to our own age: displacement, abandonment, homelessness. Yet as his vision matured, it gestured towards something more hopeful, something deeply political and crucial in these homeless times. As Novalis puts it: "Philosophy is really homesickness. It is the urge to be at home everywhere."

Simon McBurney is director of Theatre de Complicite

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