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.

In ordinary daily life we often say one thing and think another: “Do you mind?” when we think “How dare you!,” “You're looking fine” when we think “He is getting old.” Our social behavior is one truth about us, but there is another which our words and actions seldom display directly: if our acquaintances know anything of this, they have usually inferred it from tones of voice, physical reactions, peculiar emphases or hesitations, apparently meaningless mannerisms. Yet, paradoxically, this indirect impression can be the strongest and most lasting, our unspoken nervousness or confidence making a greater effect than considered conversation. And sometimes the indirect impression is one we do not take into account ourselves; perhaps some person arouses a reaction which we have never recognized in ourselves, or a situation makes us more afraid than we are able to admit. But even so, others may observe our changed behavior, for the effect we make individually is both direct and indirect, conscious and subconscious.

For Brook, Lear is a series of intellectual strands which only performance can tie together. Far from being an “unactable play,” he believes its full meaning can only be comprehended existentially—on a stage. He sees it mainly as a play about sight and blindness.

Gloucester, who does not see Edmund's villainy, loses his eyes. Edgar, who does not see his brother's covetousness, loses his freedom. Lear, who does not see the corruption and rancor that see the within his family and state, loses his senses and ultimately his life. Everywhere one looks, one sees only the facades and emblems of a world and, ironically, as characters acquire sight, it enables them to see only into a void.

Fable: A blind man, resolved to die, is led up a steep mountainside by one he takes to be a naked lunatic. The steep mountainside is, in reality, a flat field; the naked lunatic, his son.

The world of dark powers which comes from Nothing to fulfill Lear's “darker purpose.” Hecate's world, the world of the absent Queen (Genet's world), the Womb, the sulphurous pit, consumption, stench, madness, the wheel of fire, rage.

To begin the ceremony, Lear speaks of that darker purpose. (With our inadequate terminology, we might call it his Super objective.) He is in good spirits, prepared to bestow bounty and receive love; in a moment he is staring into vacancy. In the divided kingdom, the heart of darkness: “Nothing will come of nothing.” The line recapitulates a cracked fantasy of Power; the rest of the play proceeds from it. For us it was a datum: ground level. Cordelia says “Nothing“—and history is annihilated. Out of the appearance of Absolute Form, hallucination—a dark voyage through the anarchic id. Why did she say nothing? Later, the words of her charity, the most forgiving words of all, tell what weighed down her ponderous tongue: “No cause, no cause.”