So composed and so constructed, the spectacle will be extended, by elimination of the stage, to the entire hall of the theater and will scale the walls from the ground up on light catwalks, will physically envelop the spectator and immerse him in a constant bath of light, images, movement and noises.58 As with Nietzsche’s desire for a Dionysian theater, Artaud wished to reestablish an immersive space with a more direct relationship between spectator and spectacle. This meant eradicating not only the distinction between stage and auditorium, but also the monumentality of the building, allowing it to host a “constant magic” orchestrated by the “Master of Sacred Ceremonies.”59 Such space was the product of both the theory of performance and also of the feverish mind of a diagnosed schizophrenic. Louis Sass, in Madness and Modernism, saw Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty as providing a defense against “the devitalization and derealization that pervaded his being.”60 Whilst his desire to “eclipse the mind through ecstatic sensation and fusion with the ambient world” was never realized (or materialized), he psychically occupied such a zone. The paradox of Artaud is that he wished to create that which he was escaping from, to hurl himself into there, where he feared most. He longed to immerse himself in the dissolution that haunted him. The architecture of his desire was therefore like his physical being: “this dislocated assemblage, … this illassembled heap of organs … like a vast landscape on the point of breaking up.”61 Spatial dis-order was a means of re-ordering the artist’s own fragmented psyche and that of the greater social body. In discontinuous and disintegrating space the spectator is de-anaesthetized in order to force a cure. Therefore, theater for the tormented Artaud provided a fiercely transformative place of healing.
A Site of Recovery In the true theater a play disturbs the senses’ repose, frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt, and imposes on the assembled collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic.62 Over 60 years after Antonin Artaud’s treatise on the Theater of Cruelty, Ben Okri writes in A Way of Being Free that the “reality of what we are doing to one another is explosive. … There is much to scream about. … Something is needed to wake us from the frightening depths of our moral sleep.”63
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