2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

the theatre with the need to be taken seriously and secure financial backing. He was forced to cast an inexperienced actress as the leading woman because she brought finance (Esslin, 1976) and struggled to maintain any sort of livelihood for the entirety of his career. Consistently Artaud had to compromise his artistic vision to make ends meet, and such is the case in the production of Les Cenci . In The Theatre and Its Double Artaud states his belief that a pure Theatre of Cruelty without a basis in narrative would not attract audiences (Artaud, 2010), and this doubt is what led Artaud to attempt to use an adaptation of a text to begin to develop his ‘theatre divorced from the text’. One can discern from his writing in his manifestoes that Artaud was much more interested in the language of images and the subconscious meaning they carry, but likely had to compromise this for the sake of feasibility. If Les Cenci betrays the principles of the Theatre of Cruelty, it necessarily bastardises the key concepts of Surrealism. The most important link between Artaud and the Surrealists is the common emphasis on the importance of thought, and the attempt to express it in its most fundamental form. Although Les Cenci implements the conventions of the Theatre of Cruelty, it does not possess the philosophical or artistic concerns Artaud and Breton emphasised in their theory. In this case, it becomes difficult to analyse the properties of Les Cenci as an expression of the Theatre of Cruelty, let alone as an expression of Surrealism. As a result of this, it is much more difficult to analyse Artaud’s theatrical practice. It is apparently necessary to separate the theory of the Theatre of Cruelty from its practical manifestations, due to the fact that they never truly existed.

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