From Antonin Artaud to Marina Abramovic: how Theatre of Cruelty unexpectedly went mainstream
A night at the theatre can be whatever you want it to be. For some, this could represent high culture, for others it might be the most middle-brow of family entertainment, or even a jaw-dropping spectacle. However, in the public eye at least, it’s rarely meant to be particularly challenging.
Or, if theatre’s intended to challenge you, it’s meant to do so with high-minded philosophical concepts, or questions about humanity, or figuring out how much is left of this six-hour-long German opera. First and foremost, though, it’s meant to entertain the audience however that might be. This can be through engaging, intense drama by the best actors of the day or a line of high-kicking showgirls with pyro blazing in the background. It’s not meant to tell you, yeah, you personally in your seat to go fuck yourself.
Except, of course, when it does.
World War I changed something fundamental in the human psyche. Up until then, most people broadly believed that they understood the world. Some of it was great, some of it was garbage, but people knew how people worked, at least broadly speaking. The conflict showed everyone just how terrifyingly wrong they were to think that way. As a result, the art world spent the next few decades reeling from that, with Dada and surrealism being perfect expressions of that confusion and fear that was felt by the masses.
Those responses all came from the world of visual art, but theatre also reacted in the same way. The most famous response from the stage came from Bertolt Brecht. His epic, or dialectical theatre, stood against all types of theatre that came before and, in some ways, after it. Brecht didn’t want the audience to sit back and enjoy the show; he wanted the audience to engage with it as they would with a conversation or being told world-changing news. Then, Antonin Artaud took this idea of confronting the audience and ran with it.
Artaud believed that society had tamed the audience, and that the only way to get a genuine, honest reaction was to provoke them with theatre that went beyond text and dialogue. In his mind, you can’t trust them to be honest with you, so you have to bully an honest reaction out of them with work that assaults the senses.
Yes, it’s shocking, and kind of crass. But it’s utterly unignorable and no-one who watches it can “admire it” for its “good taste” and “high quality”. If Brecht wanted theatre that you thought about rather than felt about, Artaud wanted the best of both worlds for his “theatre of cruelty”.
As you can imagine, it was something of a cult concern for the vast majority of its existence. No one was putting on works truly informed by Artaud’s ideas to make money, and it wasn’t filling theatres on Broadway or in the West End. The likes of Sarah Kane made headlines for the sheer brutality contained in plays like Blasted and 4.48 Psychosis, but they began life in pub backrooms and blackbox theatres.
In fact, for years, the most famous practitioner of work that harkens back to Artaud was someone who probably wouldn’t call themselves a theatre practitioner at all. Marina Abramovic is a performance artist through and through; however, she’s put her body on the line throughout her career in a way that both repels and attracts the audience. Take a piece like 1974’s Rhythm 0, for example, when she presented herself passively to an audience, and gave them a tool of multiple implements to do with what they wanted to her.
Over the stretch of six hours, the display very nearly turned violent, with Abramovic getting her clothes cut off with a pair of scissors, thorns from a rose pushed into her flesh, and one audience member pointing a loaded gun at her. At the end of those six hours, she moved for the first time, and the audience literally ran from her. Suddenly, everyone is thinking about why they did what they did, and feeling the revulsion that comes from seeing the consequences of their actions.
For years, performance art was the place to find the teachings of the theatre of cruelty, which does make a great deal of sense. However, over the past two decades, some of the biggest theatre companies in the world have been experimenting with techniques from Artaud’s school of thought. Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan’s version of 1984 was an assault on the senses so profound that audience members fainting became a regular occurrence.
The work of immersive pioneers Punchdrunk takes more than a few cues from the theatre of cruelty, with works that seek to invoke a sensory overload on the audience. Nowadays, they can be found staging a megabudget immersive musical version of Arcane in Shanghai. Not bad for a company that has, at points, fed its audience members shots of whiskey, had witches screaming in their faces backed with blinding strobe lights and literally chased them out of shows with a chainsaw-wielding maniac in a pig mask.
The world of theatre has changed. In a world where nothing feels real, more and more people are crying out for tactile, exciting and challenging experiences. The kind that Artaud laid out nearly a century ago with his theatre of cruelty.