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Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty

My dear friend,
I believe I have found a suitable title for my book.
It will be:
THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE
For if theatre doubles life, life doubles true theatre, but it has nothing to do with Oscar Wilde’s ideas on art. This title will comply with all the doubles of the theatre which I thought I’d found for so many years: metaphysics, plague, cruelty, the pool of energies which constitute Myths, which man no longer embodies, is embodied by the theatre. By this double I mean the great magical agent of which the theatre, through its forms, is only the figuration on its way to becoming the transfiguration.
It is on the stage that the union of thought, gesture and action is reconstructed. and the double of the Theatre is reality untouched by the men of today.



Artaud, Letter to Jean Paulhan
25th January, 1936.
(Schumacher 1989, 87-88)


Petrus du Preez
1 October 2007


Stephen Barber explained that, “...the Theatre of Cruelty has often been called an impossible theatre –vital for the purity of inspiration which it generated, but hopelessly vague and metaphorical in its concrete detail.”

Antonin Artaud, one of the earlier followers of surrealism formed “Theatre of Cruelty” in the time period of 1935 after separating from roger Vitrac and their theatre project; “Theatre Alfred Jerry”. This theatre form was developed partly in parallel with the “Grand-Guignol” and the Surrealist movement. In this from of theatre, “We are not talking about that cruelty which we can exert upon one another by cutting up each other’s bodies. Rather, it is an extra moral identification which will take hold of us physically, kinaesthetically.” (Brocket) One can therefore understand “Theatre of Cruelty” as an intense need to find a way to break the false reality one experiences in theatre that...