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The Theater and Its Double

Antonin Artaud
Artaud Anthology

Antonin Artaud

"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom.

To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity.

This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.
50 Drawings to Murder Magic (The French List)

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud was a poet, theorist, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor and director, and one of the 20th century’s most important theoreticians of drama. His theory of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ has influenced playwrights as diverse as Beckett, Genet, Albee and Gelber.

Magic was always a central concept for Artaud, and in nearly all his writing it is given the most positive force, as something capable of healing the rift between words and things, culture and life. But during his nine years of incarceration in mental asylums, magic seemed to lose its illuminating transformative power and to become demonic and persecutory. Artaud entered the realm of spectres and vampires which he believed were sucking the vitality from his mind and body.

Artaud later filled twelve little exercise books with an account of his struggles to escape this physical, psychological and artistic hell. The first eleven books are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches of totemic figures, pierced bodies and enigmatic machines. Two months before his death, he took a twelfth exercise book and wrote a remarkable, incantatory text, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. It was the last thing he wrote.
Antonin Artaud : Collected Works (Volume 1)

Antonin Artaud
The Theatre and Its Double (Calderbook)

Antonin Artaud
Artaud on Theatre (Plays and Playwrights)

Antonin Artaud

All of Artaud's theatrical ideas collected in one volume Artaud's cherished dream was to found a new kind of theatre in France that would not be an artistic spectacle, but a communion between spectators and actors. This volume contains all of Artaud's key writings on theatre and cinema from 1921 to his death in 1948, together with a definitive commentary on the key texts of this 20th-century theatre visionary. Although his potent theories were never successfully realised during his own tortured lifetime, his revolutionary ideas have inspired the work of Genet, Arrabal, The Living Theatre, Grotowski, Brook and most experimental drama and performance work of the last decades. "Artaud was one of the most influential figures in European theatre , one of the great, daring mapmakers of the consciousness in extremis." (Susan Sontag)"For Artaud, the actor is the victim at the stake desperately signalling through the flames." Peter Brook
Antonin Artaud : Collected Works (Volume 3)

Antonin Artaud
The Cenci;: A play (Evergreen original, E-532)

Antonin Artaud
Collected Works

Antonin Artaud
Le Théâtre et Son Double suivi de Le Théâtre de Séraphin (Idées, No. 114)

Antonin Artaud

Ce volume a eu une influence profonde et décisive sur l'évolution du théâtre contemporain. Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) critique l'envahissement du théâtre par la psychologie et plaide pour un drame métaphysique qui s'inspire de la grande tradition de l'Antiquité, du Moyen Age et du théâtre de l'Extrême-Orient.