Hey there, I’m Mike Rugnetta, and this is Crash Course Theater.
Yorick, you are looking especially dead today.
How fitting!
Because today it’s the Theater of Cruelty, a style developed by the French genius Antonin
Artaud—a guy who believed that theater in the West had become way too hung up on realism.
He wanted theater to get out of the living room and to return to its origins—magic,
myth, and ritual.
Today we’ll be looking at Artaud’s life, and his influential book of essays and one
of his plays—the show about scorpions crawling out of a wet nurse’s vagina that you never
knew you needed.
Lights up!
INTRO Antonin Artaud was born in 1896 in Marseilles.
When he was four, he came down with meningitis.
He survived, but his health was seriously weakened.
Artaud was a depressed teenager.
He had his first breakdown at sixteen, and his parents arranged several sanitarium stays
for him.
In 1916, he was briefly conscripted into the French army but soon discharged for sleepwalking.
He went back to the sanitarium where his doctor prescribed opium.
Which is (A) not helpful for depression.
And (B) a really bad idea BECAUSE IT’S OPIUM.
He developed a lifelong addiction.
In his twenties, Artaud moved to Paris and hooked up with the Surrealists, acting in
a couple of films and writing the scenario for at least one other.
But the Surrealists rejected him.
Not cool, Surrealists!
Artaud is Surreal as heck.
Apparently they were miffed because Artaud wouldn’t renounce theater as a bourgeois
commercial art form.
You tell ‘em Artaud!
But if you consider Artaud’s theories and subsequent theatrical career, this failure-to-renounce
the commercialism of theater is legit hilarious.
Because there’s uncommercial…
And then there’s Artaud.
From 1926 to 1928, he co-ran the Theater Alfred Jarry, producing work by August Strindberg.
In these years, he started to develop the theories he would explain in
“The Theater and Its Double”—more about that in a minute.
And he tried some of them out in his staging of Percy Shelley’s incest-heavy verse drama,
“The Cenci,” which did about as well with critics and audiences as you would expect
an incest-heavy verse drama staged to actively unhinge the spectator to do.
Then Artaud went to Mexico, took peyote, wrote some memoirs, and detoxed from heroin (though
he would later retox ). He returned to France, went to Ireland, and was brought back to France
... in a straitjacket, literally, because he’d suffered a major psychotic break and
tried to attack some people.
He was diagnosed with “incurable paranoid delirium” and underwent electroshock treatment.
Eventually, he was released, and his friends paid for him to stay in a private psychiatric
clinic.
He continued writing, including poems and a script for a radio broadcast that French
radio never aired, because it was strange and rude.
Diagnosed with cancer, Artaud died in 1948.
Okay, so he may have had a dramatic life, but why are we devoting a whole episode to
a guy who did a little acting, a little directing, took peyote, and wrote a play or two before
confronting extreme mental, and eventually physical illness?
Because his theories are still a huge influence.
Looking at the portrait we’ve painted over the last number of episodes, you’ll maybe
have noticed that modern theater had a nonstop identity crisis about how to capture real
life.
Sometimes theater is like, we’re going to make it as real as possible.
Those toilets onstage are going to flush!
And sometimes theater is like, heck no!
The only way to capture real life is with myth and magic, poetry and violence.
Everything on stage is a metaphor for toilets!
On the anti-realist side, Artaud is pretty much king.
In 1938, Artaud published “The Theater and Its Double.”
The book and its theories had a lot of important influences: Surrealism, Symbolism, the works
that he helped produce at the Theater Alfred Jarry, as well as the works of Jarry himself—all
super significant.
But maybe the strongest influence was a performance by a troupe of Balinese dancers that Artaud
had seen at the Paris International Colonial Exposition in 1931.
The dance consisted, he wrote, “of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can
be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all
to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as the language of words.”
Now, to be accurate…
Balinese dance does have words.
And stories.
And specific meanings.
Artaud was doing the thing a lot of Western artists did where they saw what they wanted
to see in the art of Eastern cultures.
In Artaud’s case, he wanted a performance style that transcended psychological realism,
which he called “psychological and human stagnation.”
Inspired by the dance, he imagined a style that would “restore the theater to its original
destiny,” a mix of dance, song, and pantomime, “fused together in a perspective of hallucination
and fear.”
Real talk?
Count me in.
Artaud called this new form, the Theater of Cruelty, a place
“in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator
seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces.”
Now, Artaud wasn’t talking about actual physical violence—well, he wasn’t only
talking about actual physical violence—but rather a violent impulse that would rupture
ordinary perception and the boring normcore way that most people conduct their day-to-day
lives.
Society, he thought, had become sick, complacent, lulled by bourgeois illusion.
People needed ceremony and ritual—“a magic exorcism”—to heal.
Artaud believed that the theater had learned all the wrong lessons from Aristotle, with
his emphasis on plot and language, and his meh attitude toward spectacle.
The Theater of Cruelty was going to be all spectacle, all the time!
It would use music, dance, and certifiably bananas lighting design that would wake up
the audience to how bizarre and violent real life actually is.
He wanted a theater that would “leave an ineffaceable scar.”
In his words: “The Theatre of Cruelty has been created
in order to restore to the theater a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it
is in this sense of violent rigor 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.”
Catharsis!
Let’s book a babysitter and go!
Artaud called for a style of performance that would emphasize the mise-en-scene—sound,
lights, costumes, basically everything that isn’t text.
And yet, he didn’t really believe in sets or props.
He wanted actors who would operate not from a place of psychological realism, but from
a place of emotion, sensation, and pure physicality.
He called these actors “Athletes of the Heart.”
He envisioned a theater in which the audience would sit in the center, helpless, and the
play would surround them in an act of “organized anarchy.”
Take that, proscenium arches!
Oh, and what’s the Double after “Theatre and its...”?
That’s tricky and not completely articulated in the essays, but the basic idea seems to
be that it’s life, or what life could be if we allow theater to work on our senses
and awaken us to something better, truer, stronger, and way more intense than life as
we know it.
To Artaud, good theater should actually be more “real” than boring everyday life.
Let’s put these theories into blood-spattered practice by looking at Artaud’s early play
“The Jet of Blood” or “The Spurt of Blood.”
I guess it all depends on how you like your high-velocity blood flow.
The play was written in 1925—maybe in a single day.
Help us out, ThoughtBubble: A young man and a young girl, who may be brother
and sister, are being all lovey-dovey.
Then a hurricane arrives, and here’s a fun stage direction: “Two stars are seen colliding,
and from them fall a series of legs of living flesh with feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades,
porticos, temples, alembics, falling more and more slowly, as if falling in a vacuum:
then three scorpions one after another and finally a frog and a beetle which come to
rest with desperate slowness, nauseating slowness.”
Then a knight comes in, pursued by a wet nurse who is holding her swollen breasts.
The knight eats some cheese and chokes.
Night falls, the earth quakes, lightning flashes, and an enormous hand comes out and grabs a
prostitute by her hair and shouts, “...look at your body.”
The prostitute shouts, “Leave me alone, God!”
And she bites him.
Cue enormous jet of blood.
That title was not a metaphor!
More lightning—because God does not like to be nibbled upon!—and then everyone is
dead except for the prostitute and the young man.
They fall into each other’s arms . The wet nurse, who doesn’t have breasts
anymore, re-enters, dragging the corpse of the young girl.
Scorpions crawl out from underneath the wet nurse’s dress and here’s another fun stage
direction: “Her vagina swells up, splits and becomes transparent and glistening like
a sun.”
The young man and the prostitute run away, at which point the young girl sits up and
says, “The virgin!
Ah that’s what he was looking for.”
And scene.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
A lot … going on there.
And it all happened in about three pages of text!
The whole history of the universe, from the Garden of Eden to the apocalypse, in three
gonzo pages.
I’m gonna go ahead and say, yup, that’s the Theater of Cruelty.
I don’t know about you...
I definitely feel fused together in a perspective of hallucination and fear.
“The Jet of Blood” was scheduled for the Theater Alfred Jarry season of 1926–1927.
But it was never produced in Artaud’s lifetime.
Artaud spent a lot of his life in various institutions, and various states of mental
discombobulation.
His writing and art, especially in his later years, is cryptic, strange, and sometimes
gross.
Still, he’s been a huge influence on theater-makers and theater companies who feel let-down by
realistic writing and Stanislavski-style acting.
Jean Genet, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, the Living Theater—all big fans.
Also John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and even Jim Morrison.
As legacies go, not too cruel.
Thanks for watching!
We’ll see you next time, when we explore yet one more way to give the theatrical finger
to realism.
We’re going to meet the mostly Marxist, totally dialectical, often smelly theatrical
mastermind Bertolt Brecht.
It’s going to be epic.
But until then...Curtain.