Collected Works: Volume Three

by Antonin Artaud, Alastair Hamilton (Translator), Victor Corti (Translator)

Drama. This important volume of "Collected Works" includes one of Artaud's most seminal texts, Theatre and Its Double, and his play The Cenci. Also included are appendices, copious notes and his essay "Seraphim's Theater". The Theatre and Its Double, published here in its entirety, remains one of the most radical texts on performance in print today. The lesser-known "Seraphim's Theater" outlines an actor's application of the Taoist principles of fullness and emptiness, and has provided inspiration to actors and directors in experimental and non-naturalistic areas of the theater. The Cenci remains a landmark in twentieth-century theater as an early production of the "theatre of cruelty".

Genres: Literature

255 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1968

About the author

French surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud advocated a deliberately shocking and confrontational style of drama that he called "theater of cruelty."

People better knew Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, an essayist, actor, and director.

Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern theory, Antonin Artaud associated with artists and experimental groups in Paris during the 1920s.

Political differences then resulted in him breaking and founding the theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together, they expected to create a forum for works to change radically. Artaud especially expressed disdain for west of the day, panned the ordered plot and scripted language that his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theatre and Its Double .

Artaud thought to represent reality and to affect the much possible audience and therefore used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.

Artaud wanted that the "spectacle" that "engulfed and physically affected" this audience, put in the middle. He referred to this layout like a "vortex," a "trapped and powerless" constantly shifting shape.

Reviews

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only read the first section, a series of scenes meant to be made into films, and just browsed the rest. It's questionable how useful every letter Artaud ever wrote is to all but his biographers and obsessive scholars. Very little is said in many pages. The scenes themselves are interesting and I really admire their overall tactic--to borrow the mechanism of dreams but not be dreams, to go against representation, linear narrative, merely "telling stories"--but they also seem fairly feeble and Oedipal in their characters (usually a male lead, one women/desired object, one other male playing the place of the father). I wish for something more inhuman.