Presentation on Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double & its relations with "Drama" and other modernist practioners
	• What is Drama?
	• Defining Drama
	• Negating Drama
	• Typology of Modernist Theatres
	• Artaud's Negation
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What is “Drama”?

• isn’t just anything that happens on a stage

• an historical form of art (grows, forms, dies) dependent on particular social conditions

• the object of Artaud’s scorn - negates its principles

• Artaud calls it “storytelling psychology” - Shakespeare, Racine

• arose in Elizabethan England; came into being in C17th France; perpetuated in German Classical
[Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600); Racine’s Phaedra (1677); Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804)]

“Drama” depicts Action, enacted by Characters, through Dialogue,
within a mimetic re-creation of reality

Defining “Drama”

• “Drama” in the critical sense of the word - very specific - not normative, but historical

-> (not commanding what one should do, but describing what was done)

• Three principle features:

1) Interpersonal - 2) Dialogue form - 3) Absolute

1) not internal being; not surrounding world; all filtered through Man-Man
• soul, ideas, objects, supra-personal social dynamics -> all excluded

2) verbal form -> no chorus, prologue, soliloquy, commentary

3) several features describing Drama’s absoluteness:

• author - no presence of dramatist’s voice
• audience - no audience address
• actor - no actor-role visibility
• action - no variation / improvisation
• time - linear present tense
• space - unity of place

Negating “Drama”

• In course of The Theatre and its Double, Artaud negates each of these principles

• Not the only one to do so - range of possibilities (theatrical & dramatic modernism)

• Schematise by looking at organisation of two of basic elements of theatre:
(stage - auditorium) or (actor - spectator)

• looking at three qualities of this relationship:

Naturalistic Theatre (Stanislavski)

• Though plays of “Naturalism” are compromise formations, Stanislavski assumes “Drama’s” principles as presuppositions of his theatrical technique

• Separation: mirrored world is distinct (Peeping Toms)

• Same shape, same reality - mimetic verisimilitude

• Inwards direction - identification and empathy; catharsis resolves conflicts

Stylised Theatre (late Strindberg, Symbolists [Maeterlinck, Blok], Expressionists, Lorca)

• Artaud in 30s conservative and nostalgic for these Symbolist experiments in 1900s

• Different, incongruent reality, emphasising theatricality

• Direction oriented towards the “more true” metaphysical reality depicted

Epic Theatre (Brecht, Piscator)

• Separate - detached, critical viewing

• Incongruent worlds - hypotheses to be tested, abstraction of reality (Lehrstücke as most extreme)

• Outwards direction - conclusion of process is outside theatre; resolve social conflicts outside

• also Non-homogenous audience

Constructivist Theatre (Meyerhold, Lehrstücke, Boal)

• Eliminate footlights, merge with life - intervention in this reality

(Mayakovsky - not a mirror to reflect the world but a hammer with which to shape it)

• Incongruent world - shows and tests future as yet unrealised

• Outwards direction - experiment to be emulated, real actions, contribute to development of forces of social productivity

Total Theatre (or Ritual; Artaud, Ivanov, Nietzsche, Wagner, Grotowski)

• Strives to abolish boundary; fusion in “other” world; engulf spectator

• Incongruent - “deeper” reality doubled by theatrical reality

• Inwards direction - leave drab reality behind; catharsis effected to resolve conflicts

Artaud’s Negation

• Shares these developments - Nietzschean tradition of mass spectacle (Rousseau, Wagner, Rolland)

• By grasping theatre as a performance score & spectacle introduces the excluded terms

(inverting Aristotle’s sequence of elements)

1) Not “Man” at centre -> encompass wider reality of sub- & supra-personal (lava, nature)

2) Utilises entire range of possibility of verbal medium

3) Breaks absoluteness:

• Director as implied “epic I”
• Affects audience directly
• Non-human roles, no “role” fixed, so actor visible as such
• Relation to Time and Space becomes the object of process, not a fixed presupposition

Bibliography

• Artaud, Antonin. (1938) The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. NY: Grove, 1958.

• Kleberg, Lars. (1980) Theatre as Action: Soviet Russian Avant-Garde Aesthetics. Trans. Charles Rougle. New Directions in Theatre Ser. London: Macmillan, 1993.

• Szondi, Peter. (1965) Theory of the Modern Drama. Ed. and trans. Michael Hays. Theory and History of Literature, 29. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double
(Presentation on Artaud’s relation to “Drama” and other modernist practitioners)

© Terence Smith 2002.