Especially because he wrote most of the letters and statements that were included in his ‘Theatre and its Double’ during the time in an asylum. His mental state was never stable and this has led contemporaries into thinking that Artaud´s ideas and visions came from an unstable personality, and were not to be paid further attention. Due to severe health damage from meningitis and mental illness he spent a large part of his life addicted to drugs or locked up in psychiatric asylums. In order to get a better understanding of how Artaud thought it is important to look at his biography. Artaud as Marat in Abel Gance’s (1927) Napoleon With his avantgardist theories and statements he belongs to one of the most widely read thinkers in theatre and performance and is considered a great influence on modern performative art practice as well as fine art and politics. In this essay I would like to discuss how the work of this visionary and controversial figure within french theatre influenced generations of artists and theatre-makers and in what way his theories shaped modern theatre and modern thinking. Although his work has occupied a cultish space in both French and English criticism, the image of Artaud as a brilliant but mad theoretician and inspirational writer has reinforced itself in various different disciplines over time.
So if life and theatre are the same it is neccessary to include the evil into theatre, hence the title for his theatrical ideal ‘theatre of cruelty’. Grounded in the idea that life itself is evil and goodness is an act of will, Artaud declared that it is cruel to have to continually make the effort to live without evil. In the anguished, catastrophic times there is an urgent need for theatre that is not overshadowed by events, but arouses deep echoes within and manages to rise above an unsettled period. In Artaud´s opinion his generation’s sensibility had reached a point where it needed theatre that “wakes up heart and nerves” by erasing, or at least blurring, the borders between theatre and life (Schumacher, 1989, p102).
The French director, actor and thinker was obsessed with the idea of revolutionizing the theatre of his time by bringing meaning and truth back to the stage in a mid-20th century, war-torn Europe that was using theatre as a tool to entertain and distract the masses from what was really going on.
Theatre will never be itself again, unless it provides the audience with truthful distillations of dreams where its taste for crime, its erotic obsessions, its savageness, its fantasies, its utopian sense of life and objects, even its cannibalism do not gush out on an illusory make-believe but on an inner level.Īntonin Artaud had a radical vision.
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