THE THEATRE OF CRUELTY

The Theatre of Cruelty, developed by Antonin Artaud, aimed to shock audiences through gesture,
image, sound and lighting. One of the most influential theatre theorists of the 20th century and a key
figure of the European avant garde, Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) developed the ideas behind the
Theatre of Cruelty. The Theatre of Cruelty is both a philosophy and a discipline. Artaud wanted to
disrupt the relationship between audience and performer. The ‘cruelty’ in Artaud’s thesis was sensory,
it exists in the work’s capacity to shock and confront the audience, to go beyond words and connect
with the emotions: to wake up the nerves and the heart. He believed gesture and movement to be
more powerful than text. Sound and lighting could also be used as tools of sensory disruption. The
audience, he argued, should be placed at the centre of a piece of performance. Theatre should be an
act of ‘organised anarchy'.

‘A new theatrical language of totem and gesture’

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'.
Shortly afterwards he published his 'First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty' in La Nouvelle
Revue Française; it would later appear as a chapter in his seminal book The Theatre and Its Double.
In it he described his intention to create ‘a new theatrical language of totem and gesture – a language
of space devoid of dialogue that would appeal to all the senses’.
Images dominated Artaud’s theory of theatre. He described a ‘spectator seized by the theatre
as by a whirlwind of higher forces’. He believed that many of the conventions of theatre, prescriptive
play texts – ‘words’, he felt, ‘should have the importance they have in dreams’ – and proscenium
arches, worked against what he saw as the magic of the form, the ritual of theatre. He believed in the
abolition of the auditorium and the stage to create a single playing space with no barriers between
audience and performers.
During his lifetime Artaud’s theories remained primarily theories but their influence has been
considerable. While it can be argued that Artaud’s ideas are not always coherent or consistent, it’s fair
to say that his theories have changed the course of contemporary theatre. His work had a profound
impact on a generation of European writers including Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. The
director Peter Brook was a major advocate for Artaud’s ideas, expressed in his book The Empty Space.
His productions of King Lear and the Marat/Sade were most explicitly influenced by Artaud’s
thinking. His ideas bled beyond the world of the stage. Jim Morrison, lead singer of the 1960s
American band the Doors, was inspired by his writings on ritual and spectacle in performance. John
Cage, Merce Cunningham and The Living Theatre have all acknowledged a debt to Artaud.
Susan Sontag famously wrote that his impact was so great that ‘the course of all recent theatre in
Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods – before Artaud and after
Artaud’.

Marat/Sade
Peter Brook was a director much influenced by Artaud’s theories. This is perhaps most overt in his
landmark 1964 production of Peter Weiss’s play – the full title of which isThe Persecution and
Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction
of the Marquis de Sade – for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Theatre of Cruelty season. This
production, according to critic Michael Coveney, effectively launched ‘the fringe and alternative
theatre in this country, representing an intersection between European theory and new British
radicalism.’ There were no props, the soundtrack was jagged and cacophonous, the stage was
populated by lunatics and buckets of blood were spilled into the gutters. The effect was an
overwhelming of the senses.

Jet of Blood
Often deemed unstageable, Artaud’s short play Jet of Blood, or Spurt of Blood as it is sometimes
known, was written in 1925, but not performed in his lifetime. The text is sparse and the stage
directions are surreal. Scenes of destruction abound. There is an earthquake, a giant hand – and a jet
of blood. Scorpions crawl out of a woman’s vagina. Dead bodies are left strewn across the stage. It was
first presented by the RSC as part of its Theatre of Cruelty season in 1964; a film version, The Spurt of
Blood, by Albie Thomas, followed in 1965. A 2006 production at Theatreworks in Melbourne
consisted of ‘a series of oneiric scenes sweep[ing] through the theatre to the accompaniment of a
bruising soundtrack’, according to critic Alison Croggon. In her view, Artaud offers ‘a catalyst and a
provocation, rather than a model’.

The Changeling
Joe Hill Gibbins’s production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling at the
Young Vic employed Artaud’s methods to create his vision of a madhouse populated by grotesques.
The characters jibber and dribble as Hill Gibbins revels in the ‘mess of the body'. Jelly and ice cream
are splattered about with abandon, and the production ended in a disorientating looping, the same
line repeated into a microphone until the words cease to have any meaning.