Albert Bermel - Artauds Theatre of Cruelty

Artauds Theatre of Cruelty

Albert Bermel

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
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First published in the United States in 1997
by Taplinger Publishing Co. Inc., New York

First published in the UK in 2001 by Methuen Publishing Ltd

Reprinted by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama 2006, 2007, 2008, 2013

Albert Bermel 1997 & 2001

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN-13: 978-1-4081-1802-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

1 The Breakaway
Possibilities, Masterpieces, Irrationalities

2 Redefinitions
The Plague, Culture, Cruelty

3 Inspiration and Aspirations
Unification, Healing, Temperament and Sexual Attitudes

4 From Antiquity On
Prior to Aristotle, Aristotle, Seneca, the Jacobeans

5 Into the Twentieth Century
Epic, Surrealism, Symbolism, Modern Staging

6 Related Arts
Painting, Film, Dance, Ritual

7 Playwright
Paul the Birds, The Fountain of Blood, The Philosophers Stone, There Is No More Firmament, The Conquest of Mexico, The Cenci

8 Actor and Director
Performer, Coach, The Cenci on Stage

9 Social Redeemer
Questions, Doubts, Limitations

10 In the Auditorium
Modernizing the Classics, Encompassing the Audience

11 On the Boards
Using the Stages Three Dimensions, Depersonalizing the Characters, Inventing a New Theatre Language

12 Looking Backwards 20001977
Artauds Life and Writings: A Chronology

Anybody who writes at length about Artauds life will have to discuss his dependence on drugs and his bouts of bizarre behaviour, culminating in the twelve years he spent imprisoned in asylums. This book is not an account of his life, but of his theatre. I have appended a biographical summary, for reference, without relating it causally to his writings. But even if I had attempted a biographical study, I would have put no stock in what seems to me a fairly general assumption made by people who do not admire Artaud: that his addiction and/or insanity rendered him more sensitive, or assisted his imagination, or could have been even partially responsible for the audacity and unorthodoxy of his ideas. Artaud suffered desperately from his addiction and tested many cures; these and his periods of schizophrenia can only have hampered him as he tried to focus his thoughts, manage his life day by day, and articulate and practise the theatre he dreamed of. Coping with the double affliction exhausted him and diverted him from his purposes.

It would be unnecessary to say this if we were not still romantically disposed to looking on madness (whatever madness is) and drug-induced excitement as states of artistic elation. We use the word inspired with a consciousness of its original meaning, possessed by a spirit, preferably a demon, and are haunted by memories of Thomas De Quincey, Sherlock Holmes, and the power-drunk villains of science fiction, not to mention the legends of potes maudits.

These are partisan remarks. If we believed that Artaud had incurred artistic debts to what were evidently grave handicaps, we could not take his writings seriously as proposals; and I have wanted throughout this book to face up to those proposals as products of a mind that was uncommonly, uncannily lucid. We do find, saturating all of Artauds writings, ecstatic visions of what theatre might be. These visions, rather than any sensible philosophy or single principle, are what has given Artaud a leading place in the theatre of the twentieth century. In France I have even heard him referred to as the father of the modern French theatre. I am not at all sure that there is any one father Andr Antoine, Alfred Jarry and Jacques Copeau insist on being reckoned with but in any case, Artauds theatrical ideas have caught on, not because he was deranged or stoned on opium, but because they are extraordinary and yet fierce with sanity.

This book is a secondary and tertiary source of data, although Id like to think the interpretations are first hand.

I am grateful to the authors of the books and articles I have consulted and listed in the bibliography, including the ones I disagree with. I also thank the Research Foundation of the City University of New York for a grant that enabled me to visit Paris at a time when I was strapped for money; the librarians at the Bibliothque de lArsnal and the Bibliothque Jacques Doucet; the literary adviser at the Odon National Theatre; Irving Wardle and Caradoc King, who read the first edition and offered suggestions I was glad to incorporate; and friends and relatives in France, England and the US who, in one way or another, made the going easier.

ALBERT BERMEL

New York, 2000

The writings of Artaud give a sympathetic reader the feeling that anything is possible in the theatre. Artaud had passionately committed his life to possibilities that is, to what other people would consider impossibilities. His poets cunning and his prophetic fervor continually transform his notations of what ought to be into what is, so that one comes almost to imagine his theatrical visions realized. And yet those visions do not add up to a program or blueprint; there is little point in describing or criticizing them as though they formed a coherent whole. Prophets foresee by lightning flashes and glimmers of light. They do not tell the future, only splinters of it. I suspect that the very notion of a systematic Artaudian theatre would have been abhorrent to Artaud. I would argue with most of that quotation, beginning with the contradiction in terms, partial truths. To assert that Artauds writings are profoundly interconnected is to beg a question. How profound is profound and how deeply is it necessary to excavate? This critic does not, could not, come up with Artauds unitary concept of the theatre, let alone render it fully comprehensible. Poetry and prophecy do not offer themselves to full comprehensibility; they call forth individual and varying responses.