The Theatre of Cruelty is not bent on fostering public sadism or masochism, instead the cruel aspect of the theatrical discipline concentrates on dissolving the image of theatre as synonymous with fiction.Īrtauds own brand of surrealism attempts to shatter the illusion of theatrical falseness, and focus on creating reality within the theatre. This sinister genre has had a varied performance history, ranging from pieces such as The Cenci, written by Artaud, which features the death and execution of an entire family, to far more contemporary subjects who use the theory to create an alternative take on existing texts. His ideas about the Theatre of Cruelty redefined the limits to which an audience could be pushed, and the horrors to which they could be subjected.
~ArtaudĪntonin Artaud is the father of cruelty the gut-wrenching, spine-squirming discomfort that only a direct confrontation with physical reality can produce.
It unravels conflicts, liberates powers, releases potential and if these and the powers are dark, this is not the fault of the plague or theatre, but life. And we clearly sense Fords passionate example is only a symbol for a much greater and absolutely fundamental task. Like the plague, theatre is a powerful appeal through illustration to those powers which return the mind to the origins of its inner struggles. These torments, seductions, and lusts before which we are nothing but Peeping Toms gratifying our cravings, tend to go bad, and their rot turns to revolution: we must take this into account. Stories about money, worry over money, social careerism, the pangs of love unspoiled by altruism, sexuality sugarcoated with an eroticism that has lost its mystery have nothing to do with the theater, even if they do belong to psychology. And I think both the theater and we ourselves have had enough of psychology. Known, to the quotidian and the ordinary, is the cause of the theater's abasement and its fearful loss of energy, which seems to me to have reached its lowest point. No More Masterpieces Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the It is because we have been accustomed for four hundred years, that is since the Renaissance, to a purely descriptive and narrative theater-storytelling psychology it is because every possible ingenuity has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other and because the public is no longer shown anything but the mirror of itself. Have all finally come to think of theater as an inferior art, a means of popular distraction, and to use it as an outlet for our worst instincts, it is because we have learned too well what the theater has been, namely, falsehood and illusion. No More Masterpieces lf people are out of the habit of going to the theater, if we The Theatre of Cruelty (Second Manifesto) Theatre and Its Double Preface: Theatre and Culture
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