The Books: The Theatre and Its Double, by Antonin Artaud

Daily Book Excerpt: Theatre

Next book on the acting/theatre shelf is The Theater and Its Double, by Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud as Jean Massieu in Danish film director Carl Dreyer’s “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” (1928)

Boy, Artaud was a barrel of laughs, wasn’t he? If you hung out with that guy, it was a laugh a minute, I’m telling you!

Artaud is required reading for any theatre undergrad. He’s a very big figure in the 20th century theatre, at least in terms of his thinking about it, and his conceptions about theatre. His ideas aren’t exactly … practical, shall we say, but in his gloomy French way he really was trying to imagine a new kind of theatre, a new kind of engagement with the audience. His work has been very influential (and was probably even more so in his current-day, when his work impacted the likes of Dali and Bunuel.

He wrote manifestos. Like Martin Luther. One of them being the famous “The Theatre of Cruelty”. (See what I mean? A laugh a minute, that Artaud.)

I’m making fun of him only because one of the memories I have of Artaud is from grad school. I had a giant crush on a guy who was in all of my classes. He looked like Ed Harris. He was serious, smoldering, and a bit tortured. He was a good actor, but very limited. He could only play cold psychopaths. Anything with any lightness or humor was beyond his reach. The man was truly tormented by his childhood. But we got along great for some reason. Humor is usually my “way in” with anyone new I’m meeting, but that wasn’t the case with this guy. We talked deeply. The first thing he said to me was in a dance class at the Alvin Ailey. I was in leggings and a black Tshirt and I had my hair in a ponytail. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the dance studio, exhausted (it was 8 in the morning), waiting for dance class to start. It was the first week of school. He walked by me, glanced down at me, looked again, and then said, spontaneously, “Sheila, you’re so glamorous.” Words cannot express how UN-glamorous I was in that moment. I started laughing. I thought he was kidding. He looked hurt, like he was a small wounded animal in the forest. He said, “No. Really. You’re a very glamorous person.” I said, “Oh, sorry, I thought you were kidding. Thank you.” He called me “Glamour Girl” from then on. He would say stuff like that to me all the time. Hence: the crush. I don’t really know how to operate with someone who doesn’t really have a sense of humor but for a couple of months we hung out together all the time. We talked deeply and sincerely. I was already getting bored, God forgive me. I mean, I enjoyed talking with him, but you can’t talk about existential and spiritual matters 24/7. I mean, can you? What about making out? What about going bowling and drinking some beer? I felt like the guy in our burgeoning relationship. I wanted to get to first base, he wanted to talk about his emotions. Anyway, we had some midterm coming up in our Theatre History class. We got together to go over all our material and study together. We were at his apartment. I have to admit I was already thinking, “Dude, do you have ANY plans on kissing me or … do you just want to talk about the moon beams for the next 8 months? Honest to GOD.” We were studying our Artaud. We had all our notes spread out on the kitchen table. I had a more blunt mind than he did. I was able to boil stuff down into the three things you needed to know. (At least to get through a final.) He was much more scattered and had a hard time focusing. So we were helping each other. I said to him, “Okay, so tell me what you know about Artaud.” He began speaking, in that deadly serious way he had, with his tortured blue eyes, and his serious Ed Harris face. He talked about Artaud’s theories for about 15 minutes. I listened. It cannot be overstated how humorless this guy could be, he had to play catch-up with people who liked to joke around (and I am one of those people). I mean, when you would say to him, “Dude, that was a joke, I just made a joke,” he would laugh, but that was not the space in which he naturally operated. I liked him a LOT. I really cared about him. We did share a lot, and we worked on scenes together, and we were together all day long for three months. It was school, that’s how these things happen! So anyway, he had a kind of monochromatic voice (something he had been working on in acting class – he needed to get more variety into his voice), and he droned on and on about Artaud’s heavy-assed theories. It seemed to me that Artaud would be right up this guy’s alley. Serious, humorless, and looking for a transcendent experience. Acting was not just acting to this guy. It was a way to heal his inner wound, and a chance to rise up transcendently over his own pain. (Not surprising, he ended up dropping out of the program. He just wasn’t cut out for it, talented as he was – and he was very talented!) So I assumed that he would be a big fan of Artaud, that he would want to be in a theatre that was like THAT. He finished some droning sentence about Artaud’s yearning for cruelty and transcendence. There was a pause. I was looking at my notes, nodding at my friend’s assessment. My friend was silent for a second. Then he said to himself (as though speaking to Artaud), “Dude…. Just relax.”

I burst out laughing and then, amazingly, so did my friend, and we then laughed non-stop for 15 minutes. He ended up curled up on the floor, with tears streaming down his face, and I ended up staggering over to the couch, throwing pillows around, howling. We couldn’t stop. We had to stop studying and go get Chinese food, still breathless from laughing that way for so long. It was the first time I had seen him laugh. I couldn’t believe he had it in him! And that he had sort of chided Artaud, long dead, to “just relax” … we were still laughing about it days later in Theatre History class when Artaud would come up.

So with all of the theories that Artaud put into words, with all of his great thinking about theatre, that is the first thing I think of when I think of Artaud. That tortured guy with the Ed Harris face who called me glamorous, who sought me out, who yearned for transcendence, telling Artaud – ARTAUD – to relax.

Antonin Artaud was a sickly depressive, who had many health problems as a child, and those health problems continued through his adult years. He spent some time in sanatoriums and was addicted to laudanum. He wanted to be a writer. He lived in Paris and was involved in the avant-garde theatre of the 1920s. He worked with some big-wigs. He also was involved in cinema. He was an actor as well, and managed his own theatre, producing plays and working on his own theories of what he yearned for in theatre. He is such a giant figure in the 20th century that it is rather amazing to see him in the flesh in Dreyer’s “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc”, one of the greatest films ever made. He is just as intense and smoldering as you would imagine. His face looks like a saint’s face, or a wood cutting of some medieval torment. While Artaud’s theatre company was only in existence for a year, it attracted some of the great lights of the day, Andre Gide, Paul Valery. Artaud had an open and flexible mind. Anything he saw that attracted him he wanted to incorporate into his own plays. Many of his experiments were not successful, and many of his planned works never came to fruition. He was obsessed with lighting and sound effects. He would have been a hell of a filmmaker, once the technology caught up to his ideas. In that way, he is reminiscent of Gordon Craig, whose ideas for scenic design are still ahead of the curve, not really implement-able, but indicative of the grand space Theatre should inhabit. Artaud wanted to almost obliterate the senses of the audience. That was why he thought lighting and sound was so key. I get the sense that Artaud – similar to my friend – wanted obliteration. Some of the things he describes as what he wants in theatre actually sound like a Rolling Stones concert, a ritual at Burning Man, or a gigantic religious revival. He wanted there to be no more individuals. He wanted masses of people to become one. He wanted something to shatter his sense of self. He was not happy being himself, or – being human, actually. He was looking for an experience that would destroy his sense of self. And he was certainly onto something that a barrage of sound and lights can actually help do that, if done effectively.

His manifesto “The Theatre of Cruelty” was published in 1938. Artaud was always on the edge of sanity, and he really began to lose it in his last 10 years, the situation exacerbated by his dependence on drugs. He was incarcerated, he spent time in a strait jacket, he went mad. He was moved around from asylum to asylum. He became obsessed with astrology and magic. He underwent shock therapy.

His ideas for theatre went beyond language. He did not feel that language was the way to communicate information. It should come through sounds. He wanted to reduce things to their essences, and language was a way to cover up, to conceal. Yes, many of his ideas were not practical, and many of his ideas would either bore or scare an audience to tears, but if you read his work you can see how ahead of the curve he is. In many ways, his work is more suited to cinema, a visual medium (a medium Artaud actually abhorred), where language takes a back seat to the sounds and images one sees. It is a manipulated medium. Artaud was all about manipulation. But whenever anyone tried to actually DO what Artaud preached, it was a disaster. Like: what do you mean, Antonin, people shouldn’t … speak? They should just grunt or … make “O” sounds repeatedly? And we flash the lights? But … then what? What effect are we going for?

Artaud was not a practical man. He was an imaginative and passionate theorist, who cared deeply about theatre and how theatre could express to a populace what it wanted, dreamed, feared. Let others figure out HOW to do it. Artaud just knew that it should be attempted.

Theatre is a powerful artform. Artaud, in all of his melancholic impracticality, understood that better than most. He wanted theatre to be immediate and urgent. He took nothing for granted.

I still read some of his stuff though and hear my friend saying, quietly, “Dude ….. Just relax.”

Here is an excerpt from one of his essays, written in 1933. Here, he begins to speak about “cruelty” and what that word means to him. This is not from his famous manifesto, but it is here where he first lays out his ideas. (It is also important to note the years in which he developed his theories, which saw the rise of Fascism, and goose-stepping soldiers, and screaming Viennese anti-Semites greeting Hitler in one heaving throbbing mass. Many of his ideas also seem to yearn for that kind of obliteration of self in the midst of a group. Those images were powerful and frightening. Artaud was drawn to them.)

Excerpt from The Theater and Its Double, by Antonin Artaud

The Theater and Cruelty

An idea of the theatre has been lost. And as long as the theatre limits itself to showing us intimate scenes from the lives of a few puppets, transforming the public into Peeping Toms, it is no wonder the elite abandon it and the great public looks to the movies, the music hall or the circus for violent satisfactions, whose intentions do not deceive them.

At the point of deterioration which our sensibility has reached, it is certain that we need above all a theatre that wakes us up: nerves and heart.

The misdeeds of the psychological theatre descended from Racine have unaccustomed us to that immediate and violent action which the theatre should possess. Movies in their turn, murdering us with second-hand reproductions which, filtered through machines, cannot unite with our sensibility, have maintained us for ten years in an ineffectual torpor, in which all our faculties appear to be foundering.

In the anguished, catastrophic period we live in, we feel an urgent need for a theatre which events do not exceed, whose resonance is deep within us, dominating the instability of the times.

Our long habit of seeking diversion has made us forget the idea of a serious theatre, which, overturning all our preconceptions, inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten.

Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt.

Imbued with the idea that the public thinks first of all with its senses and that to address oneself first to its understanding as the ordinary psychological theatre does is absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty proposes to resort to a mass spectacle; to seek in the agitation of tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets.

The theatre must give us everything that is in crime, love, war, or madness, if it wants to recover its necessity.

Everyday love, personal ambition, struggles for status, all have value only in proportion to their relation to the terrible lyricism of the Myths to which the great mass of men have assented.

This is why we shall try to concentrate, around famous personages, atrocious crimes, superhuman devotions, a drama which, without resorting to the defunct images of the old Myths, shows that it can extract the forces which struggle within them.

In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually committed.

We want to make out of the theatre a believable reality which gives the heart and the senses that kind of concrete bite which all true sensation requires. In the same way that our dreams have an effect upon us and reality has an effect upon our dreams, so we believe that the images of thought can be identified with a dream which will be efficacious to the degree that it can be projected with the necessary violence. And the public will believe in the theatre’s dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality; on condition that they allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognize when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty.

Hence this appeal to cruelty and terror, though on a vast scale, whose range probes our entire vitality, confronts us with all our possibilities.

It is in order to attack the spectator’s sensibility on all sides that we advocate a revolving spectacle which, instead of making the stage and auditorium two closed worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outbursts over the entire mass of the spectators.

Also, departing from the sphere of analyzable passions, we intend to make use of the actor’s lyric qualities to manifest external forces, and by this means to cause the whole of nature to re-enter the theatre in its restored form.

However vast this program may be, it does not exceed the theatre itself, which appears to us, all in all, to identify itself with the forces of ancient magic.

Practically speaking, we want to resuscitate an idea of total spectacle by which the theatre would recover from the cinema, the music hall, the circus, and from life itself what had always belonged to it. The separation between the analytic theatre and the plastic world seems to us a stupidity. One does not separate the mind from the body nor the senses from the intelligence, especially in a domain where the endlessly renewed fatigue of the organs requires intense and sudden shocks to revive our understanding.

Thus, on the one hand, the mass and extent of a spectacle addressed to the entire organism; on the other, an intensive mobilization of objects, gestures, and signs, used in a new spirit. The reduced role given to the understanding leads to an energetic compression of the text; the active role given to obscure poetic emotion necessitates concrete signs. Words say little to the mind; extents and objects speak; new images speak, even new images made with words. But space thundering with images and crammed with sounds speaks too, if one knows how to intersperse from time to time a sufficient extent of space stocked with silence and immobility.

On this principle we envisage producing a spectacle where these means of direct action are used in their totality; a spectacle unafraid of going as far as necessary in the exploration of our nervous sensibility, of which the rhythms, sounds, words, resonances, and twitterings, and their united quality and surprising mixtures belong to a technique which must not be divulged.

The images in certain paintings by Grunewald or Hieronymus Bosch tell enough about what a spectacle can be in which, as in the brains of some saint, the objects of external nature will appear as temptations.

It is in this spectacle of a temptation from which life has everything to lose and the mind everything to gain that the theatre must recover its true signification.

Elsewhere we have given a program which will allow the means of pure staging, found on the spot, to be organized around historic or cosmic themes, familiar to all.

And as we insist on the fact that the first spectacle of the Theatre of Cruelty will turn upon the preoccupations of the great mass of men, preoccupations much more pressing and disquieting than those of any individual whatsoever.

It is a matter of knowing whether now, in Paris, before the cataclysms which are at our door descend upon us, sufficient means of production, financial or otherwise, can be found to permit such a theatre to be brought to life – it is bound to in any case, because it is the future. Or whether a little real blood will be needed, right away, in order to manifest this cruelty.