Antonin Artaud's Theater and its Double
In the process of educating myself about the theater, I happened upon The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud. When he wrote it Artaud was in and out of psychiatric care. He was also waging battles in ink with detractors over ideas he had floated in various manifestos of his Theatre of Cruelty.
Artaud kicked off his musings by asking: what is man’s true nature? How would he react, say, to the end of the world or a massive plague? This was an unfortunate starting point, for Artaud went off on a pseudo-scientific ramble on plagues, listing bodily organs which he believed accounted for human behavior. Elsewhere in his drawer-full of manifestos, letters, and polemics Artaud conceived of a new manner of theater in which verbal language was replaced with code, where actions and emotions are broken down into a taxonomy of gestures.
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Despite its oddities, the Theater and Its Double was an interesting read because of its dissection of theater’s persistent and undeniable weaknesses. Naturalism, which colored much of the theater of the time, clearly ticked off Artaud, who expected more of theater. For Artaud, theater is a primal sphere, a holy sphere, filled with man’s greatest longings, his greatest hungers, his greatest fears. Mere representation of social and psychological conflict was a trivialization of theater’s potential. Artaud rails against the bourgeousification of theater, its detachment from the wants and fears of the common man, and its self-castration.
It’s impossible to argue with any of this, and as a major voice of French Avant- garde theater, Artaud certainly made his case, although the common man his populist theater was intended for often has a low threshold for lunacy. Although the common man does occasionally favor lunatic theories and the lunatics who voice them.
Even Chekhov, in The Seagull, echoed some of Artaud’s criticisms when he voiced his character Treplieff saying, “When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must needs run from it… If we can’t [have a new theatre], let us rather not have it at all.”
And it was time for a new theater.
In concocting his new Occidental theater, Artaud drew from Balinese theater, Tarot, the Kabbalah, astrology, and his own pseudo-scientific theories. But Artaud veered off into so many incoherent tangents that (at least for me) it was impossible to fit any of it together into a whole.
Viewing Artaud’s theories in a historical context, there is also a dark side to these “populist” theories calling for purification of culture. Kimberly Jannarone’s Artaud and His Doubles looked at Artaud’s place in theater and found “two sets of doubles: one, a body of peculiarly persistent received interpretations from the American experimental theater and French post-structuralist readings of the 1960s; and, two, a darker set of doubles brought to light through close historical examination — those of Artaud’s contemporaries who, in the tumultuous, alienated, and pessimistic atmosphere enveloping much of Europe after World War I, denounced the degradation of civilization, yearned for cosmic purification, and called for an ecstatic loss of the self.”
It wouldn’t be too many years until Europe was eventually “purified” of those accused of degrading civilization.