The Theater of Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht

What is natural must work the force of what is startling." In other words, Brecht's plays and his brand of theater know as " grand theater" are designed to commence individuals through a process of alienation that will actuate them to become activists for social change that provides liberation and equality. In Brecht's large theater, we are often confronted with characters who become so alienated from decree that we do not just relate to their suffering, as is the matter in conventional dramatic theater, but we also learn that there must be social change to stop over this brand of suffering for solely human beings. As Brecht wrote of the impaction of his epic theater on individual peachs, "The epic theater's spectator says: I'd have never thought it - That's not the way - That's extraordinary, precisely believable - It's got to stop - The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary," (Bertolt, p. 1).

Brecht's epic theater, then, is aimed at promoting social activism driven toward social justice for all human beings. In this vein, it occurs on the macro-level of change in similitude to the micro-level of individual change extolled by Antonin Artaud in his "theater of cruelty," (Fowlie, p. 203). In his theater or cruelty, Artaud, influenced by surrealism and the paintings of Munch and Dali, proposed to shock audiences into a trance-like or hallucinogenic enjoin in whic

h they would become aware of the personal changed required for positive change. He felt only by direful audiences with violent images that would produce such a province of chief would individuals "break with the sensitivity and the logical mentality of the nineteenth century," which he deemed responsible for the social ills of his era, (Fowlie, p. 204).

If Brecht's goal was to publish the collective or social subconscious in audiences, then Artaud's goal was to liberate the subconscious of the individual spectator. In Artaud's theater of cruelty in which chaos, frenzy, and violence produce this transformation in the spectator, the playwright argued that the " holy goal" of theater was "to communicate delirium whereby spectators will acquaintance trances and inspiration," (Fowlie, p.

204). Artaud believed that if the playwright is able to direct audiences back to a state of mind that is one of dreams and primitive instincts, then the viewed will follow himself or herself in a "world that is bloodthirsty and inhuman," (Fowlie, p. 206). In a sense, the subjects and images of Artaud's plays were to create a primal scream, so-to-speak, in the viewer that would lead him or her back to a primal state of nature, a break with illusion, and a greater chance for rejoicing and self-fulfillment.

Fowlie, Wallace. Dionysus in Paris. New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960.

Likewise, the works of Beckett show the attack to raise individual awareness, like Artaud's attempt to shock viewers into subconscious awareness. In Beckett's Waiting For Godot, Godot never arrives in army to highlight the need for man to create his own values, substance and identity, both of self and of society, in an existential reality. Peter Weiss' "Marat/de Sade" also extends the surrealistic, violent images of Artaud's theater of cruelty in images so frankly brutal and shocking that audience members react powerfully to it. Many have discussed its effect as "shock theater," for its in writing(p) brutality
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