Artaud

Artaud was an unruly child and spent much of his youth confined in convalescence clinics, where he was first introduced to laudanum, triggering life-long addictions to a vast range of drugs. In 1920, he wrote his first collections of poetry and began to work as a theatre and then film actor; in 1924, he joined the Surrealist movement and was director of its research bureau before being expelled in 1926 in a dispute about the nature of revolution. During the whole of the 1920s and 30s he was associated with various experimental theater groups in Paris, and he cofounded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry. Artaud's theories of drama, particularly his concept of the "theater of cruelty," greatly influenced 20th-century theater. He related theater to the plague because both destroy the the thin layer  of civilization, revealing the ugly realities beneath and returning humanity to a primitive state, in which it lacks morality and reason. The aim of the "theater of cruelty" was to disturb the audience and reveal the forces of nature. To achieve this end he emphasized the nonverbal aspects of theater such as color and movement and stressed the importance of violence as a theatrical device. Artaud was afflicted with mental illness from his childhood, and in 1936 he was declared insane; he spent much of the rest of his life in mental institutions.