The Theatre and Cruelty

Author(s): Antonin Artaud and James O. Morgan

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 2, No. 3 (May, 1958), pp. 75-77
Published by: The MIT Press
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 rhe rheatre and Cruelty*
By ANTONIN ARTAUD

A concept of the theatre has been lost. And in direct proportion

to the manner in which the theatre limits itself only to allowing
us to penetrate into the intimacy of some puppet or to transforming
the spectator into a Peeping Tom, it is to be expected that the elite
will turn away from it and the crowds will go to the movies, the
music halls, or the circuses, in search of violent satisfactions which
at least have no false pretenses.
After the wear and tear to which our ensibilities have been sub-
jected, it is certain that, before all, we have need of a theatre that
will awaken us: heart and nerves.
The misdeeds of the psychological theatre since Racine have
made us unaccustomed to that violent and immediate action which
the theatre must possess. Then come the movies to assassinate us
with shadows, which, when filtered through a machine, no longer
are able to reach our senses. For ten years they have kept us in a
state of ineffectual torpor, in which all our faculties seemed to have
been dulled.
The agonizing and catastrophic period in which we live makes
us sense the urgent need for a theatre which will not be left be-
hind by the events of the day, and which will have within ps deep
resonance and which will dominate the unstability of the times we
live in.
Our long familiarity with theatre as a form of distraction has
led us to forget the idea of a serious theatre, a theatre which will
shove aside our representations, and breathe into us the burning
magnetism of images and finally will act upon us in such a way
that there will take place within us a therapy of the soul whose
effects will not be forgotten.
All action is cruelty. It is with this idea of action pushed to its
extreme limit that the theatre will renew itself.
Penetrated by the idea that the crowd thinks first with its senses,
and that it is absurd to attempt as the ordinary psychological play
does, to address itself to the understanding, the Theatre of Cruelty
proposes to have recourse to mass effects; to seek in the agitated
behavior of significant mass grouping thrown one against the other
in convulsive action a little of that poetry which is found in popular
*Translated by James 0. Morgan from Le Theatre et son Double,
Paris, 1938. With permission of Librarie Gallimard.
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festivals and in crowds on those days, now too rare, when the peo-
ple take to the streets.
All that is to be found in love, in crime, in war, in madness the
theatre must return to us if it is to become essential again.
Day-to-day love, personal ambition, banal squabbling have no
value except in an interaction with that form of terrifying Lyric-
ism that is to be found in Myths to which large collectivities have
given their belief.
That is why we shall try to concentrate around famous persons,
atrocious crimes, or superhuman devotions, a spectacle which,
without having recourse to the expired images of old Myths, will
be capable of extracting the forces which are at work in these
Myths.
In a word, we believe that there is in what is called poetry, liv-
ing forces, and that the presentation of a crime in the requisite
theatrical manner is more powerful for the mind than that crime
realized in life.
We wish to make of the theatre a reality in which one is able to
believe, and which contains for the heart and senses that sort of
concrete sting or bite which accompanies all real sensations. Just as
our dreams will act upon us and reality will act upon our dreams,
we think that one will be able to make the images of thought
identical with a dream, that will be effective only if it is hurled
forth with the necessary violence. The public will believe in the
dreams of the theatre only in so far as they are taken truly to be
dreams and not as carbon copies of reality; only so far as they per-
mit the public to liberate within them that magic liberty of dreams
which can be recognized only when steeped in terror and cruelty.
Whence this summons to cruelty and terror, which must be on
a vast scale, whose breadth will sound the depths of our entire
vitality, and put us face to face with all our possibilities.
It is in order to capture the feelings of the audience from all
sides that we favor a revolving spectacle, which in place of making
the stage and auditorium two closed worlds without possible com-
munication, will burst forth suddenly in sight and sound over the
entire mass of spectators.
Beyond this, leaving the realm of the analyzable and passionate
sentiments, we couht on making the actor's lyricism manifest in
external forms; and by this means to bring back the whole of
nature into the theatre as we want to realize it.
Howsoever vast this program seems, it does not surpass the the-
atre which seejns to us to be identified with the forces of ancient
magic.
Practically speaking, we wish to resuscitate an idea of the total
spectacle, by means of which the theatre will take back from the
movies, the music hall, the circus and from life itself, that which
has always in actuality belonged to it. This separation between the
theatre of analysis and the plastic world seems to us stupid. One
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cannot separate body and mind, the senses and intellect, and
above all, in a domain where the repeated fatigue of organs, needs
sudden shocks to revive our comprehension.
On one side, then, we have the massing and arranging of a spec-
tacle which will address itself to the total organism; on the other
side, an intensive organization of objects, gestures, signals and
signs utilized in a new spirit. The minor role given to the intellect
will lead to a rigorous compression of the text; the large role given
to the poetic emotions demands certain concrete signs. Words have
little to say to the mind; space arrangements and objects do speak;
new images speak, even those made with words. But a thundering
space of images, gorged with sounds, also speaks, if one from time
to time is able to present certain suitable arrangements of space
furnished with silence and immobility.
On this principle, we envisage offering a spectacle where these
means of direct action will be utilized in their totality. That is, a
spectacle that does not fear to go as far as is necessary in the ex-
ploration of our nervous sensibilities with rhythms, sounds, words,
resonances, and warblings whose quality and surprising combina-
tions are part of a technique whose secret is not be divulged.
To further clarify my point, the images in certain paintings of
Grunewald and Hieronymus Bosch tell us what a theatrical spec-
tacle might be-whereby in the mind of a saint, the objects of ex-
ternal nature come to appear as a temptations.
It is here, in this spectacle of a temptation, where life has all to
lose and the spirit all to gain, that. the theatre will again find its
true significance.
We have elsewhere given a program which should allow us by
means of a purified stage direction to organize such spectacles
around historical or cosmic themes known to all.
And we insist that the first spectacle of the Theatre of Cruelty
revolve about the preoccupations of masses, which are more press-
ing and more disquieting than those of an individual.
The question now is whether here in Paris, before the impending
cataclysms we can find sufficient means, financial and otherwise,
to permit such a theatre to live, and it will live-for it is the future;
or whether a little real life blood is immediately necessary, to
manifest this cruelty.
(1933)
Translated by JAMES 0. MORGAN

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