The Theatre of Cruelty

Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

In his book The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theater, particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theater because of the codified, highly ritualized physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a "Theatre of Cruelty." By cruelty, he meant not sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality which, he said, lies like a shroud over perceptions. He believed that text had been a tyrant over Meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theater made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. He also believed that sexual activity was harmful to the creative process and should be avoided if one hoped to achieve purity in one's art.

Antonin Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all expression is physical expression in space. He advocated a system of "social therapy" through theater.

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid 

(Antonin Artaud, 

The Theatre of Cruelty).

An outline of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty

Artaud had a pessimistic view of the world, 

but he believed that theater could affect change.

Remove the audience from the everyday, and 

use symbolic objects to work with the emotions and soul of the audience.

Attack The Audience's senses through an array of technical methods 

and acting so that the audience would 

be brought out of their desensitisation 

and have to confront themselves.

Use the grotesque, the ugly, and pain 

in order to confront an audience.

Philosophical views

Imagination, to Artaud, was reality; dreams, thoughts, and delusions are no less real than the "outside" world. Reality appears to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when they enter a theater to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real.

His later work presents his rejection of the idea of the spirit as separate from the body. His poems glorify flesh and excretion, but sex was always a horror for him. Incest, cannibalism, and deicide were instead normal urges, proved by the activities of tribal cultures untainted by civilized Western man. Civilization was so pernicious that Europe was pulling once proud tribal nations like Mexico down with it into decadence and death, poisoning the innocence of the flesh with the evil of a God separate from it. The inevitable end result would be self-destruction and mental slavery, the two evils Artaud opposed in his own life at great pain and imprisonment, as they could only be opposed personally and not on behalf of a collective or movement. He thus rejected politics and Marxism wholeheartedly, which led to his expulsion by the Surrealists, who had begun to embrace it.

Like Nietzsche and Buddha, Artaud saw suffering as essential to existence, and the price one must pay to become a complete human being. He thus rejected all utopias as inevitable dystopias.

Influence

Theatrical practitioner Peter Brook took inspiration from Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" in a series of workshops that lead up to his well-known production of Marat/Sade.

The Living Theater was also heavily influenced by him.