Artaud on Theatre
Contributors: Claude Schumacher (Editor, Translator); Brian Singleton (Translator)
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Published: June 28, 2001
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780413737700
Description: "Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), along with Bertolt Brecht and Vsevolod Meyerhold, is one of the great visionaries of 20th -century theatre. An actor in French stage and screen productions during the 1920s and 1930s, Artaud fled the theatre following his own disastrous production of The Cenci in which he tried to encapsulate his ideas of what he called 'Theatre of Cruelty'. A life of peripatetic wanderings and endless writing followed. His later life was spent in a mental institution. Artaud's aim, as stated in the writings included in this volume, called for a return of the theatre to its roots in ritual and for transforming the audience through total emotional, psychic and physical involvement. Although his potent theories were never successfully realized in productions during his own tortured lifetime, Artaud's revolutionary ideas have inspired the work of Genet, Arrabal, The Living Theatre, Grotowski, Brook and most experimental drama and performance work of the last decades." "This volume contains all of Artaud's key writings on theatre and cinema from 1921 to his death in 1948, including new selections which have never appeared in English before. Together with an Introduction, biographical notes and commentary, the collection charts Artaud's work from his early association with surrealism, through his founding of the Theatre Alfred Jarry, to the invocation of his compelling vision in his most famous manifesto, The Theatre and its Double."--BOOK JACKET.