Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern drama theory, Antonin Artaud associated himself with Surrealist writers, artists, and experimental theater groups in Paris during the 1920s. When political differences resulted in his break from the Surrealists, he founded the Theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together they hoped to create a forum for works that would radically change French theater. Artaud, especially, expressed disdain for Western theater of the day, panning the ordered plot and scripted language his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and he recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theater and Its Double.
Most critics believe that Artaud's most noted contribution to drama theory is his "theater of cruelty," an intense theatrical experience that combined elaborate props, magic tricks, special lighting, primitive gestures and articulations, and themes designed to shock the audience into confronting the base elements of life. Les Cenci was produced in Paris in 1935 but was closed after seventeen dismal performances. Another example of Artaud's work is The Fountain of Blood, a farce about the creation of the world and its destruction by humans. Like many of Artaud's other plays, scenarios, and prose, Les Cenci and The Fountain of Blood were designed to challenge conventional, civilized values and bring out the natural, barbaric instincts Artaud felt lurked beneath the refined, human facade. OfThe Fountain of Blood, Albert Bermel wrote in Artaud's Theater of Cruelty: "All in all, The Fountain of Blood is a tragic, repulsive, impassioned farce, a marvelous wellspring for speculation, and a unique contribution to the history of the drama."
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. The universe with its violent natural forces was cruel in Artaud's eyes, and this cruelty, he felt, was the one single most important fact of which man must be aware. . . . Artaud's theater must beecstatic. It must crush and hypnotize the onlooker's sense." Another description of the theater of cruelty was offered by Wallace Fowlie in an essay published in Sewanee Review. Fowlie wrote: "A dramatic presentation should be an act of initiation during which the spectator will be awed and even terrified. . . . During that experience of terror or frenzy . . . the spectator will be in a position to understand a new set of truths, superhuman in quality."
Artaud's creative abilities were developed, in part, as a means of therapy and healing .bye.
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