Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud(1896–1948)

Was a french playwright poet actor and theatre director he was born in Marseille France to Euphraise Nalpas and Antoine Roi Artaud both his parents were natives of Smyrna which was a native Greek city he was also greatly affected by his Greek ancestors. When he was 4 years old he suffered from severe case of meningitis which gave Artaud a nervous, irritable temperament throughout his teen years. He also suffered from neuralgia(a pain in ones nerves), stammering and severe moments of clinical depression which was treated with opium which lead to a lifelong addiction. 

He is commonly known for his book ' Theatre of cruelty' in which he stated that by cruelty he meant not extreme sadism or causing pain but just as often a violent physical determination to break the false reality he believed that text has too much value for what it is worth and that theatre should be made up of a unique language a halfway mark between thought and gesture. Artaud described it as spiritual in physical terms and believed that all theatre is physical expression in space.

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.