The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud (review)

BOOK REVIEWS THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE, by Antonin Artaud, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1958, 159 pp. Price $1.95. When in 1946 Antonin Artaud was released from a nine-year confinement in an insane asylum, the occasion was celebrated by a ceremony at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt. The fact that Charles Dullin, Jean Vilar, Jean-Louis Barrault and Roger Blin were among those present to pay tribute to the poet and the man, is some indication of the r6le Artaud plays in the contemporary French theater. The vitality of his ideas today, ten years after his death, has not diminished, and is confirmed not only by frequent mentions in the many French periodicals devoted to the theater, but by the direction the avant-garde theater has taken in the works of Beckett, lonesco, and particularly Adamov. The Theater and its Double, Artaud's most important writing devoted to the theater, is not a homogenous work, but rather a collection of essays and letters, enthusiastic, colorful, ardent, often fanatical, describing his ideas, or rather his ideals, for a radical revolution in the theater. Artaud's major thesis is that "the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak." Therefore, he would do away with the author and the text, and replace them by a meffeur en scene (director) who is in complete control. 'Lie Occidental theater, he claims, is only a theater of dialogue, a verbal theater, affd through dialogue it is not possible to touch the sources of life in the unconscious. To fulfill the purpose of the theater ("to break through language in order to touch life") we must invent a language which is purely theatrical, using space and movement, and compounded of symbolic gestures (hieroglyphs), bodily rhythms, music, lights, sounds, cries, and even words. For Artraud does not entirely reject spoken language, but merely wishes to reduce its rMe in the theater, using it as a physical presence, rather than for its intellectual connotations: language becomes intonation, incantation. Artaud constantly refers to the Balinese theater, and devotes an entire chapter to that subject, for he believes that the theater of Bali is the embodiment of his ideals. Many other exotic elements are present in the book: the Cabala with its mystical number three, Hindu systems of breath control, the principles of alchemy. Artaud, like many other surrealists, was intrigued by the unusual, for the unusual seemed to him to be a pathway toward the ineffable which is more real (or surreal) than that which reason has dessicated. The surrealist bias is seen frequently in The Theater and its Double: the reality of imagination and dreams must appear in the theater on an equal footing with life, the theater must be liberated, the brain of the spectator (who is no longer spectator, but participator) must be overcome by a "more or less hallucinatory state," the theater must address the unconscious, One is tempted to outline all the exciting ideas which Artaud expresses in his book. For anyone acquainted with the French theater, even a cursory reading reveals roots which have borne fruit in the popular theater movement, in the attitudes of some of the recent metteurs en scene, and in the writings of the latest generation of dramatists. There are manifestoes and letters describing and defending the famous "Theater of Cruelty" (whose title has undoubtedly led to misunderstanding ), and a famous chapter on "The Theater and the Plague," as well as notes on the Marx Brothers, language, and metaphysics. 63 64 MODERN DRAMA May All of this is written in a vigorous style, with powerful descriptive passages whose clarity and force evoke precisely the image the author desires. One is constantly aware that Artaud is a poet. Miss Richard's translation reproduces energetically the color and movement of the original, and occasionally even surpasses it. There are, undoubtedly, weaknesses in Artaud's arguments, and the theater he describes is perhaps an impossible one, but the conception is grandiose. The Theater and Its Double is stimulating and challenging, and will not cause luke wann reactions, for it is the work...