Published by: englishcology (Karma: 4552.52) on 23 August 2008 | Views: 1864
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Since its first publication in 1938, The Theater and Its Double
by the French artist and philosopher Antonin Artaud has continued to
provoke, inspire, enrage, enliven, challenge, and goad any number of
theatrical debates in its call for a "Theater of Cruelty." A trio of
theatrical manifestos, the book is an aggressive attack on many of the
most treasured beliefs of both theater and Western culture. According
to Artaud, the theater's "double" is similar to its Jungian "shadow,"
the unacknowledged, unconscious element that completes it but is in
many ways its opposite. As "culture" inexorably draws the artistic
impulse into safe channels, the repressed irrational urges of theater,
based on dreams, religion, and emotion, are increasingly necessary to
"purge" the sickness of society. Artaud identifies language itself as
one of the major cultural culprits, and his attacks on it occasionally
makes his text rough going. But his challenge to restore relevance to
the heart of the theatrical experience remains fundamental to the
vitality of theater, and his insistence on the sensory experience of
drama as opposed to the literary (and such innovative ideas as the use
of unconventional "found spaces") continues to be the clarion call of
the theatrical avant-garde.
