Antonin Artaud

Blake Morris

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429670978
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Theatre History & Criticism

Routledge Performance Practitioners is a series of introductory guides to the key theatre-makers of the last century. Each volume explains the background to and the work of one of the major influences on twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance.

Antonin Artaud was an active theatre-maker and theorist whose ideas reshaped contemporary approaches to performance. This is the first book to combine

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• an overview of Artaud's life with a focus on his work as an actor and director;
• an analysis of his key theories, including the Theatre of Cruelty and the double;
• a consideration of his work as a director at the Théâtre Alfred Jarry and his production of Strindberg's A Dream Play; and
• a series of practical exercises to develop an approach to theatre based on Artaud's key ideas.

As a first step towards critical understanding and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today's student.

1

BIOGRAPHY IN SOCIAL AND ARTISTIC CONTEXT

DOI: 10.4324/9780429019838-1

Madman. Mystic. Poet. Prophet. Visionary. Artists, scholars and critics often use these words to describe Antonin Artaud, one of the most influential figures of modern theatre (see, for example, Sontag, 1981; Knapp, 1980; Lotringer, 2015; Eshleman, 2001). The terms actor, director, theatre-maker and performance-practitioner are less often used. Artaud, however, was an active practitioner throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and his experience in the theatre was essential to the theories he developed. Challenging and enigmatic, Artaud’s work has had a profound influence on the development of theatre and performance.

His lasting influence on the theatre is based on a series of essays, letters and manifestos published in the 1930s that outlined his visions for a Thea-tre of Cruelty, which were collected as Le Théâtre et son Double [The Theatre and Its Double] (1938). Susan Sontag provides an indication of Artaud’s influence in her introduction to his Selected Writings, written in 1973:

[H]e has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two period – before Artaud and after Artaud. No one who works in the theater now is untouched by the impact of Artaud’s specific ideas about the actor’s body and voice, the use of music, the role of the written text, the interplay between the space occupied by the spectacle and the audience’s space.

(SW, p. xxxviii)

Almost fifty years after Sontag’s conjecture, artists continue to draw on Artaud’s ideas, with examples ranging from the immersive theatre of British company Punchdrunk (2000–present) to seminal punk artist Patti Smith’s recent recording The Peyote Dance (2019), created in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective based on Artaud’s writings about Mexico.

Artaud has a reputation for theorising an impossible theatre with no practical application (Goodall, 1994, p. 5; Finter, 1997). He insisted, however, that his writings were a starting point for practice; he was ‘a man of the theatre’ (SW, p. 210), not simply a vulgar theoretician (Gardner, 2003, p. 109). This book builds on that context, positioning Artaud’s writings on theatre in relation to his work as a writer, actor, director and producer.

PART I: ARTAUD GROWING UP (1896–1920)

Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud was born on 4 September 1896 to Antoine Roi Artaud and Euphrasie Artaud (neé Nalpas). Artaud Senior was a well-to-do shipping agent from Marseille who chartered trade ships in the eastern Mediterranean; his mother was from the port of Smyrna on the Aegean Sea (present-day Izmir, Turkey). With his father often absent on business, Artaud’s mother was the family’s primary caregiver. Known throughout his life as Antonin, a diminutive for Antoine, Artaud grew up in Marseille and spent many of his childhood summer holidays with his maternal grandmother in Smyrna.

Multiple biographers have noted the importance of Artaud’s early childhood experiences and family life in the development of his work, and particularly the work he created during and after his institutionalisation (Shafer, 2016; Stout, 1996). Some of the more influential aspects of his early childhood include the following:

• His parents were first cousins, which resulted in a closely interconnected extended family.
• The death of his siblings – only two of his eight siblings survived until they were adults, Marie-Ange and Fernand. His sister Germaine’s death at seven months of age, just before Artaud turned nine, was particularly impactful (Shafer, 2016, p. 18).
• At the age of five, he was diagnosed with meningitis; his father ‘procured a static electricity-producing machine’ to administer mild shock treatments, which was a common cure-all for a variety of ailments at the time (ibid.).
• He suffered from an intermittent stammer and frequent headaches, which persisted throughout the rest of his life (possibly related to this early illness).

His experience of meningitis started a lifelong relationship with physical ailments and neurological treatment. He would spend the majority of his life in and out of various asylums, sanatoriums and clinics and would undergo a more extreme form of electroconvulsive therapy towards the end of his life, when he was institutionalised at Rodez from 1943 to 1946.

COLLÈGE SACRÉ-COEUR (1907–1914)

His deeply religious mother raised him in a Roman Catholic tradition, and ‘the young Artaud devoutly prayed for several hours each day’ (Höpfl, 2005, p. 249); for a period of time, he even considered becoming a priest. In 1907, at the age of nine, he began attending the Collège Sacré-Coeur, a bourgeois parochial school where he remained a student until he was eighteen. Two years earlier, France had passed a law establishing itself as a secular nation (Sherman, 1999, p. 74) and as David Shafer, one of Artaud’s biographers, has noted, ‘to send a child to a parochial school at the [time] was a strong statement on a family’s piety, if not hostility to the secular values of the French Republic’ (Shafer, 2016, p. 22). Artaud theorised theatre as a religious, holy experience (TD, p. 50), and the images he employed often reflected his Catholic upbringing (TD, pp. 91–92).

It was at the Collège that Artaud first started writing poetry. The poets that excited him were challenging conventions and creating new forms, such as the American writer Edgar Allan Poe and the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He began collaborating with his school classmates on a private literary journal around the age of 14, where he would publish his first poems under the pseudonym Louis des Attides (Esslin, 1976, p. 1). In 1914, his final year at school, he destroyed most of his written work and gave away his books to his friends. In response to his noticeable psychological distress and withdrawal from social life, his parents had a psychiatrist examine him.

According to his brother Fernand, the psychiatrist diagnosed Artaud’s dislike of his parents as the primary problem (Shafer, 2016, p. 25); Artaud biographer André Roumieux attributes it to a rejection of his entire family unit, including his brother and sister whom he could not stand (Roumieux, 1996, p. 17). Whatever the exact cause, Artaud was admitted to La Rouguiere, a clinic near Montpellier, where he began treatments under the supervision of the renowned doctor Joseph Grasset in 1915 (Shafer, 2016, p. 25).

INTRODUCTION TO INSTITUTIONALISATION (1915–1918)

Grasset was a leading professor at the University of Montpellier. His recent publication, Thérapeutique des maladies du système nerveux [Therapy for Ailments of the Nervous System] (1907), argued that nervous conditions were often related to relations between blood relatives and ‘religious excesses’, both of which Artaud exemplified (Shafer, 2016, p. 25). He diagnosed Artaud with neurasthenia – a vague diagnosis that covered a wide variety of nervous disorders associated with fatigue, irritability and depression – and administered a mixture of treatments that included hydrotherapy and mineral baths, as well as cocktails of narcotics and stimulants. This was Artaud’s first exposure to opiates, to which he would become increasingly dependent throughout his life.

His treatment was interrupted in 1916, when he was conscripted into the French army to serve in World War I and stationed at a training camp in Digne, in south-eastern France. His service was brief. Within five months of his induction he was released from duty due to ‘an unspecified health reason’ and fully discharged the following year (Shafer, 2016, p. 26). Though morphine was a commonly prescribed drug for wounded soldiers during the war (Kamieński, 2016, p. 83), it is unclear if Artaud was able to receive the drugs he had been prescribed in his treatment. He would later claim he was discharged due to his sleepwalking, though his mother identified the reason as his nervous condition (Shafer, 2016, p. 26).

Once again, his parents had him admitted to a series of sanatoriums to treat his nervous disorders, which were exacerbated by his experience of the war. He was sent ‘to Saint-Dizier, near Lyons, to Lafoux-les-Bains, to Divonne-les-Bains, and to Bagnères-de-Bigorre before he spent two years at a Swiss clinic [Le Chanet] near Neuchâtel’ (Rowell, 1996, p. 18). At Le Chanet, where he was admitted in 1918, he was under the supervision of Dr Maurice Dardel. Dardel encouraged Artaud to write and draw as part of his treatment (Eshleman, 2001, p. 162). He also prescribed him morphine and laudanum, solidifying what became Artaud’s lifelong addiction to opiates (ibid.).

Artaud’s chronic illnesses and resultant drug use affected his work and relationships in various ways. His friend and collaborator Jean-Louis Barrault reflected in his memoirs,

As long as [Artaud] kept his lucidity, he was fantastic. Royal. Prodigious in his vision. Funny in his repartees. He was completely lubricated with humour. But when, under the effect of drugs or illness, his escapades submerged him, the machine began to creak and it was painful, wretched. One suffered for him.

(Barrault, 1974, p. 81)

Artaud always positioned himself as a patient in need of relief rather than a drug abuser: ‘I understand prohibiting the sale to addicts, but not to an unfortunate type like me who needs it so that he no longer suffers’ (cited in Shafer, 2016, p. 43). Barrault corroborated this, reflecting that Artaud’s drug use was primarily medical rather than an exercise in expanding his consciousness: ‘from an early youth his bodily sufferings were cruel. To mitigate them, he took drugs’ (Barrault, 1974, p. 83).

France did not implement a national social health insurance system until 1945 (Chambaud and Hernández-Quevedo, 2018), which meant that Artaud was often unable to access or afford appropriate drugs for his treatments. At times, aware of his increasing dependence on opiates, he would attempt to detoxify himself. During these periods, he would have experienced opiate withdrawal, which is characterised by physical symptoms ranging from aches and pains to excessive sweating, diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting (Farrell, 1994). When one such period of withdrawal occurred in 1924, he wrote to his friend and sometimes financial sponsor Yvonne Allendy that he was suffering from ‘violent gnawings’ and a ‘spinal column full of cracklings, painful at the top’ (cited in Shafer, 2016, p. 101). Noting that it had been ‘some weeks’ since he had ‘stopped using any drugs’, he declared his detoxification ‘a waste of time’ (ibid.).

PART II: ARTAUD IN PARIS (1920–1936)

Dardel believed Artaud would benefit from a return to France and recommended he be placed under the supervision of Dr Édouard Toulouse. Toulouse was a renowned French psychiatrist who was running an asylum in the Parisian suburb of Villejuif as part of a major project reforming asylum care in France. He had a long-standing interest in the arts, and part of his research focused on the relationship between artistic genius and psychiatric diagnoses (Eshleman, 2001, p. 162; Shafer, 2016, p. 31). In 1912, he had founded the art, science and culture journal Demain, which ‘aimed at promoting a fuller, more integrated life-style on the basis of a fusion of scientific and “moral” thought’ (Esslin, 1976, p. 18).

Dardel specifically recommended Toulouse based on Artaud’s literary ambitions: he thought the ‘the more vibrant cultural life in Paris and the guidance of Dr Toulouse would provide the patient with a therapeutic artistic outlet’ (Shafer, 2016, p. 29). After assessing Artaud, Toulouse decided to take him on as a boarder, believing his home would be a more conducive environment to support Artaud’s creative and artistic development than Villejuif (ibid., p. 33).

Artaud boarded with Toulouse and his wife Jeanne through the end of 1920 (Esslin, 1976, p. 19). During this time, Toulouse provided Artaud with his first opportunities to write professionally. He contributed a wide variety of writings to Demain, ranging from an improved curriculum for the baccalaureate to reviews of art exhibitions and plays and was made him managing editor of the journal in March 1920 (Rowell, 1996, p. 159). Toulouse also helped him publish works in some of the leading reviews of the day, including the in-house magazine for the Theatre de l’Œuvre (Ho, 1997, pp. 13–14). This served as Artaud’s introduction to the professional theatre world in Paris.

ARTAUD AND PARISIAN THEATRE

Artaud’s arrival in Paris coincided with a period of avant-garde experimentation that expanded and reshaped French theatrical traditions. Through the mid-nineteenth century, it was customary for authors to direct their own texts. If the author was not available, a stage manager was responsible for ensuring the text’s stage directions were followed to the letter. When there was a director, it was generally an administrative role: ‘the author, the actor and the scene painter were the artists of the theatre realm’ (McCready, 2016, p. 2).

By the 1920s, however, the role of metteur-en-scène had gained prominence in France through the pioneering work of André Antoine at the naturalist Théâtre Libre (1887–1896). Antoine promoted the ‘“exciting but obscure work” of directing – “an art that [had] just been born”’ (Jannarone, 2010, p. 138). This was followed by the innovative work of Lugné-Poë at the Symbolist Théâtre de l’Œuvre (1893–1929), the first director with whom Artaud would work. As Artaud developed his acting career, he continued to work with directors who were actively pushing the boundaries of theatre. His exposure to and participation in the cutting-edge theatre of the time shaped his practice in important ways.

Metteur-en-scène literally translates to ‘scene setter’ and refers to the director of a production. The role of was first brought to prominence by Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen in Germany (1826–1914), a German aristocrat who, in 1886, established his own court theatre troupe where he oversaw every aspect of the staging and production. The role was not officially acknowledged in France until 1941 when ‘the Vichy regime created the Comité d’organisation des entreprises du spectacle [Organizing Committee for the Entertainment Industry] and first used the term’ (Jannarone, 2016, p. 107, n. 11).

During a failed attempt to sneak into a production at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, Artaud had a happenstance meeting with Lugné-Poë (Shafer, 2016, p. 37). Lugné-Poë and Toulouse were friendly, and Toulouse initiated a formal introduction. This led to Artaud’s first volunteer roles in a professional theatre as a prompter and stage manager (Murray, 2014, p. 61). He was also given his first opportunity to appear onstage, in a non-speaking role in Henri de Régnier’s Les Scrupules de Sganarelle [Sganarelle’s Scruples] (1921). In an assessment of Artaud’s work decades later, Lugné-Poë ‘praised him for the originality of his make-up and the elegance of his movement which made him appear as “a painter who had strayed among actors”’ (cited in Esslin, 1976, p. 19).

In October 1921, his maternal uncle, Louis Nalpas, a French film producer and the artistic director of the influential production company Société des cinéromans, arranged an au...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• 1 Biography in Social and Artistic Context
• 2 Artaud’s Key Writings
• 3 The Théâtre Alfred Jarry (1926–1929)
• 4 Practical Exercises
• Glossary of names
• Bibliography
• Index