French poet and dramatist Artaud, Antonin’s proposal---put forward in two short manifestos published together in The Theatre and its Double (1970)---for the recovery of theatre’s specific powers of action and its own language. Theatre had to break with its subjugation to the text, he argued, and find its own way of expressing itself, which he thought would lie somewhere between gesture and thought. He didn’t want to dispense with spoken words altogether, but he argued that rather than use words from known languages, theatre should use the language of things, which would consist of vocalizations he called ‘breath sounds’. He also advocated the use of lighting and music as part of the performance and not merely as an adjunct to it. The aim was to create a theatre that was not focused around the psychological states of specific characters and therefore beholden to an old-fashioned notion of what theatre can be. Artaud was vehemently opposed to realism in the theatre for this reason. Like Brecht, Bertolt, he insisted that the way the actors moved themselves on stage had to be changed, so as to break with the conventions of realism. By cruelty, then, Artaud meant not sadism or horror as such, but a concentrated discipline, attentiveness to every detail of the performance and a constant vigilance against backsliding into the old way of doing things. For Artaud cruelty is synonymous with lucidity. Although most theatre critics and practitioners consider Artaud’s proposals impossible to stage in full---they are like the impossible-to-build designs of conceptual architecture in this regard---this has in no way diminished their importance or influence, particularly with radical and experimental directors like Peter Brook and Richard Schechner whose work was pushing the boundaries of the possible in any case. Further Reading: S. Barber Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (1993).