> Le théâtre et son double, de Antonin ARTAUD (Gallimard, coll. « Idées », 1966. Prix : 2,90 F.)
Se reporter au compte rendu de Théodore QUONIAM
In: Les Études philosophiques, No. 1, « PHILOSOPHIE ET VIOLENCE » (JANVIER-MARS 1968), p. 61… ; (en ligne),
URL : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aj12S4vPoCO-zVx6MyRgoi-6OF45Ubyw/view?usp=shari...

this book should be read, closely read, re-read, and taken seriously by anyone who ever takes theatre seriously as an artform, a means of communication, a way of life, or the only thing we've ever done besides procreating, defecating, and dying.

it's written by a total lunatic who's thoughts and precision cannot be dismissed because of his insanity. to the contrary, his particular mental disturbances so sharpen his thoughts, that, at the very least, they need be considered, if not pored over with great care.

as with many of our madmen, artaud was directionally crazy, and his direction took him through the heart of theatre.

the fantastic thing about this book, for anyone working in theatre, is that it gives you the answer to the question: what would i think about what i'm doing here if i were so batshit crazy that i could think about nothing else?

and, at some level, if you have no answer for that question, you've really fucked up to've ended up where you are, my friend. ( )

Mooie vertaling van alle teksten die Artaud onder de noemer 'theater van de wreedheid' schreef; verbazend modern, leerrijk en brandend actueel. Beschouwingen over theater met een andere kijk. Verkwikkende lectuur. ( )

Is theatre a branch of literature or an art in its own right?

The most important work of theatre theory of the 20th century, theatre historians divide the history of their subject into ‘before’ and ‘after’ Artaud’s seminal text. Before Artaud, theatre (especially, but not only in France) was a branch of literature; the text was all important, and that text was psychological: characters talked about their inner states, and conflicts arose as a clash between different aims and intentions of the characters. The playwright was king, actors and directors were subsidiary supporting ‘workers’, whose job was to bring the text to life.

Artaud held that theatre should be an art form in its own right, and he sought to inject theatre with some of the pagan, atavistic, magical, sacrificial, ritual, ceremonial, cathartic power that it had once had in Ancient Greece, and which he saw as still existing in the theatre of the East, especially Balinese theatre, which exercised an incalculable influence on Artaud’s ideas.

For Artaud, the text is irrelevant; the theatre must create a new language of theatrical signs, in which the mise en scene predominates over the text, a language (what later theorists would call semiotics) consisting of music, design, space, props, lighting and sound effects, movement and gesture. This total theatre, this new theatrical grammar, liberated from the stifling power of the psychological word, will work directly on the audience’s entire nervous system, cleansing and purifying.

It’s Artaud’s ideas which gave rise to what used to be called ‘director’s theatre’, a theatre in which the ideas or interpretation of the director takes precedence over the text, or indeed in which there is no text, but the work is devised in workshop as a collaborative process between director, designer, writer and actor. Chief examples of this are the productions of Grotowski, Brecht, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, and in our own time, the theatre of Robert Lepage and possibly, Le Cirque du Soleil (although this has become merely watered down entertainment now.)

Central to Artaud’s vision of a real theatre (as opposed to a staged text) is the notion of cruelty, and it’s this idea that makes The Theatre and its Double such a powerfully important literary text – apart from Artaud’s fabulous, incandescent prose – outside the immediate field of theatre studies. It’s also an idea that was –and continues still to be – much misunderstood. The term appears in his Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty from 1938 and is later developed in a series of letters to J.P. ( I do not know who this is – a critical and academic apparatus to the Grove Press edition of the English translation is woefully non- existent.)

For Artaud, cruelty is a metaphysical condition, a necessary concomitant to consciousness. There is no cruelty without consciousness and without the application of consciousness. It is consciousness which gives to every act of life its blood-red colour, its cruel nuance…. For Artaud, cruelty arises from the consciousness of ones acts, and from a range of mental attitudes with which one does those acts, especially the determination to carry acts through. He lists these mental attitudes thus: rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination. The dual notion of determination (determination in its every day sense of ‘intention’, determination in its technical philosophical sense as ‘necessity’) is crucial here. If, as philosophers maintain, free will is an illusion and everything is determined, then this is an act of cruelty on the part of some creator/nature; to be conscious of this is to suffer cruelty: The most current philosophical determinism is, from the point of view of our existence, an image of cruelty. For Artaud, our life is bounded by, infused by cruelty as a result of our consciousness of our lack of free will.

Life itself is cruelty, then. (This was unfortunately so for Artaud himself, who spent years locked away in mental institutions, often against his will, and who probably took his own life, although we are not sure about this). A theatre such as that envisioned by Artaud would break down the life-culture dichotomy, and would allow culture – which Artaud sees as actually smothering the true nature of life - to really represent life: A protest against the idea of culture as distinct from life – as if there were culture on side and life on the other, as if true culture were not a refined means of understanding and exercising life.

The theatre will never find itself again – i.e. constitute a means of true illusion – except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. ( )

This is one of those books that seems cursed by having been too influential. Some of the arguments, presumably ground-breaking at the time, have been so thoroughly absorbed in later theoretical and artistic developments that they seem obvious. The end result is a book that feels repetitive and rather banal. The message may be trivial, but Artaud's writing is lively. He covers Balinese theater, Kabbalah, Aztec culture, and the Black Death; not in the manner of an eclectic scholar, but rather like someone who has become fiercely obsessed with a few random subjects. As a Marx Brothers fan, I appreciated this bit near the ending: "The poetic quality of a film like Animal Crackers might correspond to the definition of humor, if this word had not long since lost its meaning of total liberation, of the destruction of all reality in the mind." ( )