Artaud, Antonin (1896—1948) French poet and playwright. His notion of a Theatre of Cruelty had an enormous influence on twentieth-century experimental theatre. Owing to illness, both mental and physical, Artaud spent a considerable portion of his childhood in hospital. This set a trend that was to continue for the rest of his life. He was conscripted into the army in 1916, but was soon discharged on medical grounds. It was during one of his rest cures, as they were known, in a sanatorium that he was prescribed laudanum as a mental relaxant, with the result that he became an addict of opiates. Artaud never had a proper career. He lurched from one thing to another, seemingly at random, but apparently with the constant aim of challenging the perception of reality. At the age of 27, Artaud sent poems to the journal La Nouvelle Revue Française, which were rejected by its editor Jacques Rivière, who was nonetheless intrigued enough by what he read to start a correspondence with Artaud. These letters in turn became Artaud’s first major book. He was also able to pick up work as an actor in a few silent films, gaining minor roles in films directed by Germaine Dulac and Carl Dreyer. Artaud was involved with the Surrealism movement at this time too, but he was expelled by the so-called Pope of Surrealism Breton, André though not before he formed an association with Roger Vitrac, who was also expelled from the movement. Together they ran the Jarry, Alfred Theatre, named after the creator of ’pataphysics, from 1926 to 1928. They directed works by Vitrac, Claudel, and Strindberg, to great critical success. Despite the fact that productions were attended by the leading intellectuals of the period, including André Gide and Paul Valéry, the venture failed commercially and was forced to fold. In 1931 Artaud witnessed a performance of Balinese dance at the Colonial Exposition in Paris and though he didn’t understand it fully, it proved utterly transformative of his thinking about what theatre can and should be. Its influence can clearly be seen in the ‘First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty’, which was published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in the same year. A few years later, in 1935, Artaud travelled to Mexico where he had a second transformative experience in an encounter with the Tarahumaran people (his experiments with peyote were no doubt a factor too). He returned to France in 1937. His most important work The Theatre and its Double, bearing the traces of both these encounters, was published in 1938. It proved to be one of the most influential theatrical manifestos of the twentieth century. The last ten years of Artaud’s life were spent in mental asylums. He continued to write prolifically, however, and produced some of his most challenging works in these years. It is highly likely that Artaud was a schizophrenic and it is as an authentic voice of ‘madness’ that his work, outside of the theatre, is celebrated and examined, particularly by Foucault, Michel and Deleuze, Gilles. Further Reading: M. Esslin Antonin Artaud (1976).