Antonin Artaud

Universally recognized as one of the greatest theatre artist to ever live, Antonin Artaud is today a neglected man, particularly in America.

In an America that can't get enough mainstream in its blood stream, he is completely unknown, except by historians of the theatre. This is but one reason Europeans have a skeptical view of America and its abiding will to arrogance, which is always stupendously wrong-headed.

In a nation that began disparaging Euro influences during the tick-tock of its war machine's dullest hour; in a nation of profound ignorance which revels in its moronic worldview, inasmuch as it has one; in a nation rigged against the influence of intellectual advancement that is not attached in some meaningful way to capital; in this nation of half-wits and shoddy politicians who have joined together to debase and destroy culture, only to replace it with doll houses filled with painted figurines and all manner of gizmos that serve to enslave the majority; it is in this nation that the hicks have conspired to take over--it is they whom have ignored Artaud.

Artaud is rolling around in his grave, cursing the gods and saying, "I told you so!"

Unhinged from an early age, Antonin Artaud invented the Theatre of Cruelty, and described it as a necessary expression in open space, organic in nature, which should envelope the audience in a reality of convergence; expression becomes cruel in that its focus and intent is to remind the audience that it is living. Theatre becomes the heart, the blood of the living, and provokes physical illness or discomfort.

Theatre becomes a method of killing the dead by making the audience uncomfortable with living. Surrealists—of whom Artaud was an early organizer—argued life has a same smugness. Complacence and deadness become indistinguishable.

Until they are ruined by the mental equivalent of a bomb aggressively planted on your frontal lobes, they will dominate man and ultimately destroy him.

Theatre should be shock therapy in a sense, which happens to be one of the treatments Artaud finally succumbed to in his battle with schizophrenia.

If theatre fails to make you feel dizzy with angst and trepidation, if you do not feel your senses exploding, myth deflating, anger regenerating; the play has failed on some primeval level.

Artaud was mad, which in art is never a bad thing. Oh, but how he suffered for his genius and hallucinations! He wrote his major theoretical and philosophical works between stays in various insane asylums.

Over the course of his life his dependency on opiates drove him deeper and deeper into an hallucinated reality. His friends stuck by him through the madness, until he died alone, in a hospital, of stomach cancer in 1948.

At one of his last public performances, he made his friends, some of the leading figures of France's intellectual hierarchy, so uncomfortable that they fell into a pin-drop silence of wonderment. Mad and drug-addled for years, Artaud read his discombobulated lecture aloud, repeatedly losing his place, his thoughts tangential and fragmented, until he began to speak in an alien tongue only he understood—gibberish, a nonsensical soundscape.

Finally, he dropped his papers, then his glasses, and fell to the floor groping, groping as the audience gasped and fell silent, embarrassed that it had come to this.

Artaud was hopeless!

But was he? Andre Gide waited, waited, watching Artaud from the front row, as Artaud frantically tried to gather his papers, find his glasses, and continue with this...this...

Gide applauded and raced up to the stage, embraced Artaud with both arms, raised him off the floor and led him away.

It was not a cruel trick, but rather a cruel reality. Artaud had proved his point.


TS