Antonin Artaud: Theatre of Cruelty Essay - 1401 Words.
The Theatre Of Cruelty English Literature Essay. During the early 1930s, the French dramatist and actor Antonin Artaud put forth a theory for a Surrealist theatre called the Theatre of Cruelty. Based on ritual and dream, this form of theatre launches an attack on the spectators’ subconscious in an attempt to release deep-rooted fears and.
Theatre is intended to challenge and disturb to release in us a sense of free licence, to unlock our sense of decorum and to act as a catalyst for our dreams to become reality. Theatre of cruelty was the third double. Artaud wanted to indicatethe combination of three presences involved in the process of making theatre.
It is difficult to say something specific about Antonin Artaud and to limit his contributions of not just re-inventing or re-forming the concept of the theater but also of art, human intellectuality and psychology. Before coming to the idea of The Theater of Cruelty Artaud was concerned with the worlds insignificance towards culture. Artaud explains.
Clearly Artaud has a definite idea of what he wants his audience to take home from his theater, and he comprehends the way to make it happen: he appeals to their emotions, to their reactions, to their humanity. Artaud's Theater of Cruelty is deliberately alienating to the human being.
Antonin Artaud: Theatre of Cruelty Essay Example. Antonin Marie Artaud was born in 1846 in Marseille France to his Greek parents, Euphrasie Nalpas and Antoine-Roi Artaud. He was one of the two surviving children out of nine, but he was very ill. Many of his problems can be attributed to his early childhood illnesses and the way they were treated.
Although Artaud’s theater of cruelty was not widely embraced, his ideas have been the subject of many essays on modern theater, and many writers continue to study Artaud’s concepts. Author George E. Wellwarth, for example, in Drama Survey, explained the theater of cruelty as “the impersonal, mindless—and therefore implacable—cruelty to which all men are subject.
Artaud is more of a Theorist than a practitioner- he wrote many essays on Theatre- but only actually produced 1 play. As a result, his ideas have to be interpreted and there are many different versions of Theatre of Cruelty out there (many of them are not very creative or actually meet Artaud's ideas beyond screaming and trying to be scary- which is a very simplistic reading of his theatre).