ABSTRACT
The direct link between Artaud and the modern avant garde is Jean-Louis Barrault. Taking only the more technical aspects of the Theatre of Cruelty, his work develops a‘total theatre’ based on Artaud’s concept of the actor as‘an athlete of the emotions’. Barrault’s first production, a mime version of As I Lay Dying (Autour d’une mère), was performed barely a month after The Cenci; and Artaud’s enthusiastic response led to plans for collaboration. They were to work together on staging Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year in a specific attempt to give tangible shape to the ideal image of drama that Artaud had outlined in‘The theatre and the plague’ (the key essay in The Theatre and its Double). However, Artaud withdrew from the project because, as he wrote to Barrault, he was incapable of the compromise any collaborative work entailed and believed there were fundamental differences in approach: Barrault’s mime being primarily descriptive, not symbolic, and relating to factual reality instead of presenting hieroglyphic expressions of the soul. But if any modern director can be counted a disciple of Artaud, it is Barrault.
