"Anything that acts is a cruelty. it is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed
beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt"
Cruelty is lucid. When Artaud speaks of cruelty he does not necessarily invoke blood and carnage. Instead he infers a kind of strict control and submission to necessity. To create, to breath, to cry - these are forms of cruelty, and ideas to be played out and acted upon the stage.
"With any change in state - from dark to light, matter to spirit, inertia to movement - there will be cruelty."
And the cruelest entity is that wihich is created within and of itself - nature, chaos, the origin. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - the myth, the truth and the beginnings of the endurance of torment. When God in his rage thrust man from Paradise, he cast a division between man and himself and man and the universe. Man is lost, he walks the earth in limbo, unable to fly, unable to breathe in water, able only to walk in circles, seeking union, seeking truth. This is the the torture of man and this is the cruelty Antonin Artaud speaks of.
However, he points out that where the creation myth in itself was the malefactor capable of creating Oedipus Rex, Renaissance paintings, works by Blake, Shakespeare etc, fear traverses the times like fashion. It alters, fluctuates through decades. What provoked terror in the seventeenth century had little effect in the twentieth. And so new myths must be created, brought to life on the stage through the theatre of Cruelty's three forms - puppetry, desmemberment and de-identification.
One of the greatest fears of mankind which will never fade is that of death. Artaud believed that fear leads to turmoil and turmoil leads to fissures in our way of thinking. Questions need to be asked and the answer comes in artform. He thought not of fear of loss or fear of pain but specifically the fear of death, the finality, the limitations which we can never understand. In volume four of his works Artaud wrote a piece titled 'theatre and the Plague' and in doing so chose the most horrific manifestation to create fear and expression.
Theatre and the Plague
The opening pages of volume four are an explicit blow by blow account of the body's surrender to plague.
"Before any pronounced physical or psychological sickness appears, red spots appear all over the body, the sick person only suddenly noticing them when they turn black. He has no time to be alarmed by them before his head feels on fire, grows overwhelmingly heavy and he collapses. Then he is seized with terrible fatigue, a focal, magnetic, exhausting tiredness, his molecules are split in two and drawn towards their annihilation."
There are reasons for his choosing the plague as an axis of fear. He notes two observations. The first is that the plague leaves the brain and the lungs free from putrefaction, whilst other organs become fragile or hypertrophied. The second is that these two organs are within our control; we choose to breath, we choose to think. We cannot reverse the flow of blood, speed up our digestion or control the gall bladder, but we can hold our breath or change trajectory of a thought process.
"Hence the plague seems to make its presence known in those places, to have a liking for all those physical localities where human will-power, consciounsess and thought are at hand or in a position to occur."
Free-thinking whilst the body dies. Utmost fear and concentration as you wait for death to take you.
This is not a horror story. This is the plight of the artist to revolutionise the face of theatre, of the arts, of expression. His aims included rejection of a psychological theatre, a return to the mythical in rewriting the metaphysical, the invention of a new theatrical language, the explanation of reason through the dream state and in so doing eliciting terror in the audience and the inclusion of the audience in all performances, each being part of the microcosmic theatre which rotates in the cosmic whole. Later theatre companies such as The Theatre of the Absurd and The Living Theatre took what they could from his manifesto, using more than human language to keep Artaud alive in communicating the answers to the questions none of us dared to ask.