theatre of cruelty

Aristotle in his Poetics ' says that tragedy must contain the quality of mimesis or imitation : Art must mimic life . This primary requirement has been interpreted several ways over the history of drama . One can take it to mean that mimesis lies in faithfully reproducing a character 's every look , gesture and twitch , to make one 's costumes and props meticulously true to the era in which a play is set . It can also go beyond the imitation of physical forms and move to the realm of emotional authenticity . For Antonin Artaud , the theater

's double was life - and it was a double ' not merely in its efforts to reproduce situations that could presumably happen in real homes and real streets to real people , but also in the sense that the theatre , like life , had in it the ability to contain metaphysics , plague , cruelty the pool of energies which constitute Myths , which man no longer embodies ' That is , one could go beyond drawing-room scenes , indeed one should go beyond drawing-room scenes or conventional , comfortable great romances ' and evoke from the audience a more visceral reaction

Artaud advocated a Theater of Cruelty ' - that is , a theatre that would mean a union of thought , gesture and action reconstructed ' that would rely not merely on language but draw upon the other resources available to the stage which were not as readily available for poetry or fiction . He believed that words were unequal to the expression of certain feelings - indeed , he felt that all...