In his book Theatre and its Double, Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese Theatre. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualized physicality of Balinese dance performance., and advocated what he called a "Theatre of Cruelty". By cruelty, he meant not sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality which, he said, lies like a shroud over our perceptions. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language halfway-between thought and gesture. Antonin Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all expression is physical expression in space. Artaud was institutionalized for some time beause he was considered insane.
The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage. Edited by E. Bentley. Penguin, 1968, p.66
An outline of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty
Artaud had a pessimistic view of the world, but he believed that theatre could affect change.
Remove the audience from the everyday and use symbolic objects to work with the emotions and soul of the audience.
Attack the audience's senses through an array of technical and acting so that the audience would be brought out of their desensitisation and have to confront themselves.
Use the grotesque and the ugly, the confronting and the painful to confront an audience and be cruel to them.
Selected works
The Artaud Anthology published by City Lights Publishers
Artaud's parents were partly Levantine-Greek, and he was much affected by this background.
Artaud's parents arranged a long series of sanatorium stays for their disruptive son, which were both prolonged and expensive.
Artaud also recorded his horrific withdrawal from heroin upon entering the land of the Tarahumaras; having deserted his last supply of the drug at a mountainside, he literally had to be hoisted onto his horse, and soon resembled, in his words, "a giant, inflamed gum".
Artaud symbolized for all the generations in his audience an exceptional fidelity to a very great belief, a life devoted to a cause and an unflinching persistence in extolling the cause.
Artaud summarized the classical tradition of the French theater, which he found still dominant, as that art which states a problem at the beginning of a play, and solves it by the end.
Artaud has acknowledged that in this conception of the theater, he is calling upon an elementary magical idea used by modern psychoanalysis wherein the patient is cured by making him take an exterior attitude of the very state that he should recover or discover.
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