The Artaud Experiment

Extract

With the intransigence of an innovator who feels himself inspired, Antonin Artaud, by an imperious gesture of the pen, by an imperious gesture of the mind, wrote off about two thousand three hundred years of theatre.

Of Western theatre.

We are in the early thirties. This was the period when Louis Jouvet successfully produced the masterpieces of Jean Giraudoux: the period of Electra and her half-god, half-prophet Beggar, just before the Trojan War would not take place, and a little longer before Ondine would glisten in the first rays of another world. This was the period when Charles Dullin created the terrifying protagonist of Richard III, the saraband of ‘Tis a Pity She's a Whore, tragedies as frenzied as tragedies can be, in which howling, cursing, death-bed laments alternate with love songs and sweet tenderness. This was the period when George Pitoëff preserved from mere fashionable success Chekhov's Sea Gull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, Ostrovsky's Storm, and an extraordinary Hamlet like Romeo.