Theatre and its Double
Encyclopedia
The Theatre and Its Double (Le Théâtre et son Double) is a collection of essays by French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...

 and published in 1938.

Artaud intended his work as an attack on theatrical convention and the importance of language of drama, opposing the vitality of the viewer's sensual experience against theatre as a contrived literary form, and urgency of expression against complacency on the part of the audience.

The collection's more famous pieces include No More Masterpieces, an attack on what Artaud believed to be the elitism of an irrelevant, outdated literary/theatrical canon, and The Theater of Cruelty, where Artaud expressed the importance of recovering "the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought."

The collection is still read to this day, and strongly influenced the directing philosophies of such renowned figures as Peter Brook
Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.-Life:...

.

See also

  • Le Mondes 100 Books of the Century
    Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
    The 100 Books of the Century is a grading of the books considered as the hundred best of the 20th century, drawn up in the spring of 1999 through a poll conducted by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde....

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