Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde. In particular, he had a profound influence on twentieth-century theatre through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty. Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive work, his texts explored themes from the cosmologies of ancient cultures, philosophy, the occult, mysticism and indigenous Mexican and Balinese practices.
Early life
Antonin Artaud was born in Marseille, to Euphrasie Nalpas and Antoine-Roi Artaud. His parents were first cousins—his grandmothers were sisters from Smyrna (modern day İzmir, Turkey). His paternal grandmother, Catherine Chilé, was raised in Marseille, where she married Marius Artaud, a Frenchman. His maternal grandmother, Mariette Chilé, grew up in Smyrna, where she married Louis Nalpas, a local ship chandler. He was, throughout his life, greatly affected by his Greek ancestry.
Euphrasie gave birth to nine children, but four were stillborn and two others died in childhood. Artaud was diagnosed with meningitis at age five, a disease which had no cure at the time. Biographer David Shafer points out, "given the frequency of such misdiagnoses, coupled with the absence of a treatment (and consequent near-minimal survival rate) and the symptoms he had, it's unlikely that Artaud actually contracted it."
From 1907 to 1914, Artaud attended the Collège Sacré-Coeur, a Catholic middle and high school. Here he began reading works by Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Edgar Allan Poe and founded a private literary magazine in collaboration with his friends. At the end of high school he started to noticeably withdraw from social life and "destroyed most of his written work and gave away his books".:3 Distressed, his parents arranged for him to see a psychiatrist.:25
Over the next five years Artaud was admitted to a series of sanatoria.:163 There was a pause in his treatment in 1916, when Artaud was conscripted into the French Army.:26 He was discharged due to "an unspecified health reason" (Artaud later claimed it was "due to sleepwalking", while his mother ascribed it to his "nervous condition").:4 In May 1919, the director of the sanatorium prescribed laudanum for Artaud, precipitating a lifelong addiction to that and other opiates.:162 In March 1921, Artaud moved to Paris where he was put under the psychiatric care of Dr Édouard Toulouse who took him in as a boarder.:29
Career
Theatrical apprenticeships
In Paris, Artaud worked with a number of celebrated French "teacher-directors". These included Jacques Copeau, André Antoine, Georges, Ludmilla Pitoëff, Charles Dullin, Firmin Gémier and Lugné Poe. Lugné Poe, who gave Artaud his first work in a professional theatre, later described Artaud as "a painter lost in the midst of actors". His core theatrical training was as part of Dullin's troupe, Théâtre de l'Atelier, which he joined in 1921.:345 Artaud remained a member for eighteen months.:345
As a member of Dullin's troupe, Artaud trained for 10 to 12 hours a day. Originally Artaud was a strong proponent of Dullin's teaching, stating: "Hearing Dullin teach I feel that I'm rediscovering ancient secrets and a whole forgotten mystique of production.":351 In particular, they shared a strong interest in east Asian theater, specifically performance traditions from Bali and Japan.:10 Dullin, however, did not think Western theater should be adopting the language and style of east Asian theatre. Instead he promoted a theatre of transposition; for Dullin, "To want to impose on our Western theater rules of a theatre of a long tradition which has its own symbolic language would be a great mistake."
Artaud came to disagree with many of Dullin's teachings.:352 Their final disagreement was over his performance of the Emperor Charlemagne in Alexandre Arnoux's Huon de Bordeaux and he left the troupe in 1923.:22 He joined the Pitoëff's troupe in 1923, remaining with them through the next year when he put more focus on his work in the cinema.:15-16