Artaud, Antonin (1896-1948). French poet, playwright, and theoretician of the theatre. Plagued by ill health and mental instability from an early age, he began writing poetry at school and joined Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre as an actor in 1920. He subsequently established himself as a man of the theatre with the companies of Dullin and Pitoëff, though his extravagance sometimes caused conflict. He was also to do a great deal of acting for the cinema, notably as Marat in Gance’s Napoléon. In 1924 he joined the Surrealist movement and in 1926 founded the short-lived but controversial Théâtre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac.
A turning-point occurred for Artaud in 1931, when he witnessed Balinese dancers at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. He published an article on the performance, which seemed to him to offer an alternative to decadent Western theatre. This was the first of a series of essays published in 1938 as Le Théâtre et son double. In ‘Le Théâtre et la peste… read more
Artaud, Antonin (1896-1948). French poet, playwright, and theoretician of the theatre. Plagued by ill health and mental instability from an early age, he began writing poetry at school and joined Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre as an actor in 1920. He subsequently established himself as a man of the theatre with the companies of Dullin and Pitoëff, though his extravagance sometimes caused conflict. He was also to do a great deal of acting for the cinema, notably as Marat in Gance’s Napoléon. In 1924 he joined the Surrealist movement and in 1926 founded the short-lived but controversial Théâtre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac.
A turning-point occurred for Artaud in 1931, when he witnessed Balinese dancers at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. He published an article on the performance, which seemed to him to offer an alternative to decadent Western theatre. This was the first of a series of essays published in 1938 as Le Théâtre et son double. In ‘Le Théâtre et la peste’ and ‘Le Théâtre de la cruauté’ he expressed ideas which were to have a profound and lasting influence on the development of modern drama, arguing against the lifeless psychological, analytical content of the Western tradition and proclaiming the need for forms of theatre which inflicted an emotional, physiological contagion on the audience. He sought to establish that the essence of theatre was a type of delirium calling up the dark forces in humanity and nature. It is thus a challenge to civilization and ethics, relating to primitive levels of experience and operating on the stage through gesture, movement, lighting, colour, and music rather than through words.
In the mid-1930s Artaud struggled for money to establish a theatre where he could put his ideas into practice, and wrote a book on Heliogabalus, the mad Roman emperor, as well as outlines of plays to illustrate his method. In 1935 he managed to stage Les Cenci, based on the tragedy by Shelley, and full of blood, rape, incest, and murder; it was greeted with widespread incomprehension. None the less, his programme for a new type of theatre, revolutionizing everything from the architecture to the training of the actors, was to shape the work of a range of directors including Brook and Barrault. His life was dogged by mental illness and drug addiction; the anguish he sought to express through poetry and other writings made of him a modern visionary and a martyr to his art. —answers.com
