Antonin Artaud 

Born in France in 1896, he was a young man during the First World War but managed to escape due to ill health. Aged 19, he was committed to a mental hospital where mistakenly, the doctors prescribed him laudanum (a liquid form of the drug opium/heroin) which unfortunately lead to a life-long addiction to drug of all kinds. Many say this is where most of his work came from, when he was high. 

In his younger years, he lived and worked as an actor, designer and theatre critic in Paris. Appearing in film and theatre, Artaud joined a new artistic movement called Surrealism. The Surrealists believed that art should combine both dreams and reality in order to create something ''surreal'' and new.

He set up am experimental theatre company in which he could try out his ideas and put on plays by other new, quirky dramatists. His Theatre, named after the first Surrealist playwright Alfred Jarry, never made any money due to it causing constant public outrage with its anarchic productions. Artaud was so individualistic, emotional and uncompromising in his ideas and presentations that he was even expelled from the Surrealists, viewing him as a threat. 

Artaud was penniless and starving throughout the 1920's and 30's. Not being phased but this, he continued to write and lecture on the subject of theatre and to put his ideas into action at the Alfred Jarry Theatre. 

By 1935, his failures as a director were apparent and he ceased to be involved with Theatre on a practical level. Nevertheless, his great Theatre Manifesto's The Theatre of Cruelty and The Theatre and its Double were published during this period and he began to seek help for his drug addiction by taking part in a series of detox programmes. 

In the late 1930's Artaud travelled to live with the native Indians in Mexico to learn about their ceremonial rituals. He was fascinated with the raw emotion produced by these very humanized ceremonies and included them in his future work. 

Returning to Paris, he began to lose grip on reality even further. He acquired a walking stick which, he was convinced, had belonged to a St Patrick and undertook a journey to return it to the Irish People. He was arrested in Dublin after a series of fights and deported back to France in a straight jacket. 

Artaud was kept in various mental institutes for the next eight years. He continued to write and draw as part of his therapy, even inventing his own language in order to communicate his ideas. He was released to semi-freedom in 1946. Artaud began to record a series of lectures which were to be broadcasted on National Radio but they were seen as too controversial and banned last minute. 

Antonin Artaud died alone on the 4th March 1948. It is un-known if he took his own life or not. 

This is a sheet on some of Artaud's theories.