Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud was a French dramatist, poet, actor, and theoretician of the Surrealist movement who attempted to replace the “bourgeois” classical theatre with his 'Theatre of Cruelty,' an experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself. Artaud was a very sickly child which then led him having lifelong mental disorders that sent him repeatedly into asylums. When Artaud was a teenager, he began to have sharp head pains, which continued throughout his life. In 1914 he was the victim of an attack of neurasthenia and was treated in a rest home; the following year he was given opium to alleviate his pain, and he became addicted within a few months. He experimented heavily with drugs and was also confined for some time to a mental institution where he underwent t electric shock therapy. Artaud spent nine of his last 11 years confined in mental facilities but continued to write, producing some of his finest poetry during the final three years of his life.

He was inducted into the army in 1916, but was released in less than a year on grounds of both mental instability and drug addiction. In 1918 he committed himself to a clinic in Switzerland, where he remained until 1920.


THEATRE OF CRUELTY Theatre of Cruelty: A type of theatre aimed to shock audiences through gesture image, sound and lighting Cruelty: To shatter our ‘false’ reality Surrealism: To break away from yourself and explore dreams/fantasy states

Antonin Artaud developed the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ to communicate to the audience a sense of pain, suffering, and evil, using gesture, movement, sound, and symbolism rather than language and many of his plays were influenced by his own personal experiences, especially his mental health problems.

Artaud wanted to disrupt the relationship between the audience and performer. The ‘cruelty’ in Artaud’s view was sensory, it existed to shock and confront the audience, to go beyond words and connect with the emotions: to wake up the nerves and the heart. He considered gesture and movement to be more powerful than text. Sound and lighting could also be used as tools of sensory disruption. Artaud believed that the actor is like an athlete whose body is all important and it is through breath that an actor can summon feelings. The audience, he argued, should be placed at the center of a piece of the play in order to create a sense of entrapment.

Artaud believed that naturalistic theatre, which was popular in his time, created apathetic audiences and that all people were savages with secret desires to commit outrages. He thought that the theatre’s role in society was to help us understand ourselves and to know who we are. He developed his theatrical methodologies with the aim of affecting audiences and making them think about what they were seeing both on stage and in society.

“Re-establishing theatre as pure and independent creativity whose products are hallucination and terror”



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