Artaud and Adolescents

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Artistic intentions

PC: What else interests you about Artaud?

RM: The thing that I really like about Artaud is that he is so anti-theatre.

PC: Do you mean traditionally mainstream theatre?

RM: Yes. I studied English at school and I hated going to the theatre, I just found it really boring and that is what Artaud writes about.

PC: That idea of reacting against ‘boring’ has become quite mainstream and it is the root of the ideas that are studied in schools. Influential theatre practitioners all find something boring in the theatre they have experienced and their ideas develop as a reaction. Artaud is a very popular practitioner in schools, which I imagine would make him turn in his grave! I think that popularity is intrinsically tied to the adolescent condition: frustration with the world as it is presented to you, feeling that you are existing in a world between life and death, a hyper-awareness of the body. Artaud just lived that kind of experience throughout his life.

RM: Yes, it is something inspirational that most people lose when they grow up.

PC: I know that this is an impossible question but can you summarise Artaud’s work?

RM: His overriding concern was with the body and with expressing the body. The whole thing about trying to get away from language is an attempt to directly express bodily experience; not the body as it is seen from the outside but the body as it is lived. The overriding thing is the body but it is also the whole question of expression and representation. How do you represent experience without diminishing it?

Summary

  • Artaud is anti-theatre.
  • Artaud’s overriding concern was with the body and with expressing the body.
  • How do you represent experience without diminishing it?