The Theatre of Cruelty (French: Théâtre de la Cruauté, also French: Théâtre cruel) is a form of theatre generally associated with Antonin Artaud. Artaud, who was briefly a member of the surrealist movement, outlined his theories in The Theatre and its Double. The Theatre of Cruelty can be seen as a break from traditional Western theatre and a means by which artists assault the senses of the audience.
Encyclopædia Britannica describes the Theatre of Cruelty as "a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself". It goes on to say that Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté (1932; Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty) and Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double) both called for "communion between actor and audience in a magic exorcism; gestures, sounds, unusual scenery, and lighting combine to form a language, superior to words, that can be used to subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world." Artaud warned against the dangers of psychology in theater and strove to create a theater in which the mise-en-scène, everything present in the staging of a production, could be understood as a codified stage language, with minimal emphasis on spoken language.
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| Antonin Artaud. |
It was a piece of Balinese theatre that Artaud saw at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 that began to shape his ideas about gesture and performance. He was interested in the use of facial expressions and the relative unimportance of the spoken word. Gesture, he felt, could communicate an artist’s unconscious and conscious intentions in a way that words were incapable of expressing (though a writer himself, he believed that words could only do so much). Gesture could make these things visible on stage. ‘All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it… That is why an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal have more significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics'. Also during this year, Artaud's First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty "The Theatre and Its Double" was published in La Nouvelle Revue Française. [Read] Antonin Artaud: The Theater and Its Double.
In 1935 Artaud staged a production of Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci at the Théâtre des Folies-Wagram in Paris.:250 The drama contains themes of abuse, incest, violence, murder and betrayal. In Artaud's stage directions, he described the opening scene as "suggestive of extreme atmospheric turbulence, with wind-blown drapes, waves of suddenly amplified sound, and crowds of figures engaged in 'furious orgy'", accompanied by "a chorus of church bells", as well as the presence of numerous large mannequins.
In 1947, one year after having spent nine years in psychiatric hospitals, Antonin Artaud published a beautiful book as an apologia of Vincent Van Gogh, “Suicided By Society” like every other visionaries that has been categorized as mad. Artaud, fifteen years before Michel Foucault, affirms that madness has been created by psychiatric medicine and not the other way around. He accuses doctors and Van Gogh’s brother Theo, to have, not only ignored, but actively suppress the expression of the painter’s art. The invention of the adjective suicided illustrates exactly the process of psychiatry. By having elaborated this medicine method, society did not want simply to kill those that it could not assimilate (like it would do for prisoners for example), but it wanted them to recognize themselves their vision as a pathology and therefore to make them commit a social suicide. [Read] Antonin Artaud: Van Gogh, the Suicide Provoked by Society.
While the Theatre of the Absurd (French: théâtre de l'absurde) is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s, as well as one for the style of theatre which has evolved from their work. Their work focused largely on the idea of existentialism and expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. The structure was in a round shape and the finishing point was the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.
Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "The Theatre of the Absurd". He grouped these plays around the broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert Camus uses the term in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The Absurd in these plays takes the form of man's reaction to a world apparently without meaning, or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. This style of writing was first popularized by the Eugène Ionesco play The Bald Soprano (1950). Although the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play".
Nonsense talk: Theatre Of The Absurd
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