Born in London, England, United Kingdom, he studied at Oxford. During the 1950s he worked on many productions in Britain, Europe, and the USA, and in 1962 returned to Stratford to join the newly established Royal Shakespeare Company for which he directed, among other productions, King Lear (1962), Marat/Sade (1964), US (1966), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970). Moving to Paris in 1970 he founded with Micheline Rozan the Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale renamed in 1973 the Centre International de Création Théâtrale, an assembly of actors, dancers, musicians, and other performers of many nationalities, with which he travelled widely in Africa and Asia. Films he has directed include Lord of the Flies (1962) and Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979) and Mahabharata (1989). Since then Brook has created a variety of other theatrical works, such as a version of Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1994), a production of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1998), and a streamlined Hamlet (2000).
His work was inspired by the theories of experimental theatre of Grotowski, Brecht, Meyerhold and theatre of cruelty of Antonin Artaud and the metaphysics of G. I. Gurdjieff.
His books on the theater include Empty Space (1969), The Shifting Point (1987), and The Open Door (1995).