Theatre of Cruelty

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The Theatre of Cruelty is a concept in Antonin Artaud's book Theatre and its Double. “Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds” (Artaud, Theatre and it's Double). By cruelty, he meant not sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality which, he said, lies like a shroud over our perceptions. To put it another way, it's not cruelty in the sense of being violent, but the cruelty it takes for the actor to completely strip away their masks and the cruelty of showing an audience a truth that they don't want to see. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language halfway-between thought and gesture. Antonin Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all expression is physical expression in space.

In the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud was attempting a few things: he had believed that the world, including the society, and the world of theatre had become an empty shell of itself. In the theatre of cruelty, he was trying partly to revolutionise theatre - figuritively burn it to the ground so that it can start again. On another level he was trying to connect people with something more primal, honest and true within themselves, that has been lost for most people. This has, it is believed, partly stemmed from Artaud's mental instability - he was attempting to purge himself through expression.

Stephen Barbar notes in his book, Artaud: Blows and Bombs, that "the Theatre of Cruelty has often been called an impossible theatre -- vital for the purity of inspiration which it generated, but hopelessly vague and metaphorical in its concrete detail." This notion of the impossibility of Artaud's theatre has not stopped others from utilizing his principles, most notably by Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski.

Fantasy author Terry Pratchett wrote a short story named after this concept as part of his Discworld series – see Theatre of Cruelty (Discworld).

In 2003 the Cinémathèque Française featured a program called "The Cinema of Cruelty" which featured films, such as Roger Avary's "Killing Zoe," that followed Antonin Artaud's mandates for the Theatre of Cruelty.