Brings together essays on art, literature, social problems, drama, and cinema and other prose writings that best represent the French critic's revolutionary thinking

Selected Writings (English and French Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Antonin Artaud

History & Criticism

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

The Cenci: A Play.

Dramas & Plays

GROVE PRESS

The surrealist and visionary, Antonin Artaud, cherished a dream to found a new kind of theatre in France that would not be an artistic spectacle, but a communion between spectators and actors. This is a commentary on a selection of key texts by Artaud, founder of the Theatre of Cruelty.

Artaud on Theatre

METHUEN

Founder of the Theatre of Cruelty and a strong influence on Peter Brook, Artaud dedicated his life and sanity to purging the French theatre of its enervating bourgeois tendencies. This book includes his major writings about theatre.

Artaud on Theatre (Plays and Playwrights)

Humor & Entertainment

Methuen Publishing Limited

Collected Works

Calder Publications Ltd

Collected Works: v. 4 (French Surrealism)

Essays & Correspondence

The theatre and its double: Essays; (Signature series)

Drama. This important volume of "Collected Works" includes one of Artaud's most seminal texts, Theatre and Its Double, and his play The Cenci. Also included are appendices, copious notes and his essay "Seraphim's Theater". The Theatre and Its Double, published here in its entirety, remains one of the most radical texts on performance in print today. The lesser-known "Seraphim's Theater" outlines an actor's application of the Taoist principles of fullness and emptiness, and has provided inspiration to actors and directors in experimental and non-naturalistic areas of the theater. The Cenci remains a landmark in twentieth-century theater as an early production of the "theatre of cruelty".

Collected Works: v. 3 (French Surrealism)

Calder & Boyars

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, The Theater and Its Double is the fullest statement of the ideas of Antonin Artaud. We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger,” he wrote. He fought vigorously against an encroaching conventionalism he found anathema to the very concept of theater. He sought to use theater to transcend writing, to break through the language in order to touch life.”

The Theater and Its Double

Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Araud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence. 
Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself. -- Stephen Barber

Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist

Arts & Photography

Solar Books

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Books by Antonin Artaud