User:Aitantv/Artaud, A (1978) The Theatre and Its Double

• "For if theatre is like the plague, this is not just becayses it acts on large groups and disturbs them in one and the same way. There is both something victorious and vengeful in theatre just as in the plague, for we clearly feel that the spontaneous fire the plague lights as it passes by is nothing like a gigantic liquidation" (p18)
• "...theatre is a powerful appeal through illustration to those powers which return the mind to the origins of its inner struggles." (p20)
• "I maintain the stage is a tangible, physical place that needs to be filled and it ought to be allowed to speak its own concrete language." (p26)
• Theatre "has lost any true sense of humour and laughter's physical, anarchic, dissolving power." (p 29)
• "The audience will believe in the illusion of theatre on condition they really take it for a dream, not for a servile imitation of reality." (p61)
• "instead of harking back to texts regarded as sacred and definitive, we must first break theatre's subjugation to the text and rediscover the idea of a kind of unique language somewhere in between gesture and thought."(p 63)

+ I am wary of Artaud's inherent romanticm or exoticisation for Easter theatre and his distain for the dry, text based French idea of theatre. He talks of hieorglyphs, gutteral sounds, bodily stamping.

• "We localize this breathing, distibuting it between contracted and deconstracted states. We use our bodies like screens through which will-power and relinquished will-power pass." (97)
• "In Europe no one knows how to scream any more, particularly actors in a trance no longer know how to cry out, since they do nothing but talk, having forgotten that have a body on stage, they have also lost the use of their throats. Abnormally shrunk, these throats are no longer organs but monstrous, talking abstractions. French actors now only know how to talk." (p 99)

Artaud, A (1978) The Theatre and Its Double, Editions Gallimard