The plague destroys all that enslaves man in his daily shackles of norms, rules, and constructed realities, all that deprives him of the essential truths found within. This is an essay of such gravity, and such insight into the heart of theatre and the pits of man, that it traces the ambitions at the very limits of all our artistic endeavours.Īrtaud draws an unthinkable analogy, sifting through a history of fatal contagions we label as “the plague” and arriving at the eponymous observation that it is here, in the plague’s own ambiguous method of appearance and reappearance, of individual bodily invasion, and of societal terror and collapse, that we may find theatre’s own raison d’être. OF all the essays in Antonin Artaud’s seminal collection, Le Théâtre et son double (The Theatre and Its Double, 1938), there is one in particular that leaves an indelible impact not only on its readers but also on the rest of Artaud’s work, its reverberations reaching out to redefine both what came before it and what would come after. Image: Reha Bliss, “Human Sacrifices” Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and The Plague: A Film by Wolfgang Pannek
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