Antonin Artaud didn’t want to entertain you. He wanted to infect you. He wanted to burn down the theatre, then climb into the ashes and scream until the gods woke up. His Theatre of Cruelty was never a metaphor. It was a ritual, a possession, a violent reminder that behind every mask of civilization there is a jaw, and behind every jaw, a scream waiting to be released.
In this episode of The Observing I, we do not study Artaud. We survive him. We walk with him through the electric corridors of his mind, through the plague-ridden rituals he called theatre, through his years locked in institutions where his bones were fried with shock and his language dissolved into raw sound. We listen as he curses God. We watch him tear apart language, theatre, art, sanity, and finally himself.
This is not a biography. It’s a descent. A séance. A reckoning with the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled in the name of comfort and coherence. Artaud offers no answers. He offers a scream. A body without organs. A theatre that bites back. His madness is not illness. It is method. Sacred. Violent. Necessary.
Enter only if you’re ready to confront the performance that lives under your skin. The one with no script. No exit. No applause.
You have been warned.
To Have Done with the Judgement of God
As discussed in the episode, this is the original 1948 broadcast of Artaud’s “To Have Done with the Judgement of God”.
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