The Theatre And Its Double

The Theatre and its Double (1974) by Antonin Artaud (Calder and Boyars), ISBN: 0724507032
Condition: Good (as sold by Crappy Old Books)

Some books politely explain themselves. The Theatre and its Double kicks the door off its hinges, screams directly into the soul of Western culture, and then demands the stage be set on fire — spiritually, aesthetically, and preferably with a full cast of drummers. Antonin Artaud isn’t here to help you “appreciate performance.” He’s here to exorcise it. If you’ve ever sat through a tasteful evening of theatre and thought, “Yes, but why do I still feel completely unshaken as a human being?”, Artaud has arrived to correct that.

This is the infamous manifesto (and anti-manifesto, and fever dream) where Artaud argues that theatre should stop being a polite literary event with people reciting well-behaved lines, and become something closer to a ritual, a plague, a psychic assault — an experience that hits the audience in the nervous system before it ever reaches the intellect. Words are fine, he suggests, but also: words are liars. The real truth is in gesture, sound, rhythm, breath, bodies in space, the kind of atmosphere that makes you feel you’ve accidentally wandered into a ceremony you weren’t invited to. He wants theatre that doesn’t soothe you, doesn’t flatter you, and definitely doesn’t let you leave thinking, “What a lovely set.”

Reading it is like being trapped in a room with a brilliant, furious prophet who keeps pacing, pointing, and insisting that civilisation is a thin costume we should tear off immediately. Artaud’s ideas feel startlingly modern — and also intensely of their time — because he writes with that rare conviction that art is not decoration but necessity. His famous “Theatre of Cruelty” isn’t cruelty in the “sadism and fake blood” sense. It’s cruelty as rigour: the refusal to let art be merely entertainment when it could be a force that rearranges your internal organs.

And yes, it’s intense. The prose comes in waves: aphorisms, rants, visions, demands. Sometimes it reads like a set of instructions for a production that can’t exist. Sometimes it reads like a curse placed on the drawing-room theatre you thought you liked. Sometimes it reads like Artaud is trying to punch language until it admits what it’s hiding. You may not agree with everything (or anything). You may not even understand everything on the first pass. That’s fine. Artaud would consider confusion a promising early symptom.

This edition from Calder and Boyars is the kind of book that looks innocently “academic” until you open it and realise you’re holding a grenade disguised as criticism. It’s perfect for directors, performers, theatre nerds, and anyone who enjoys watching the foundations of an art form get politely demolished and then rebuilt with drums, screams, and metaphysical weather.

Condition: Good, which feels appropriate: slightly scuffed, lightly battered, as if it has survived being carried around by someone who kept saying, “I’m going to change theatre forever,” and then went back to their day job. Sold by Crappy Old Books, of course — because the best place to buy a revolutionary text about tearing down the illusions of bourgeois culture is from a shop whose name suggests it might also sell a haunted dictionary and a suspiciously sticky copy of Waiting for Godot.

Ideal for readers who like their theory ferocious, visionary, and faintly unhinged, and who believe theatre shouldn’t just represent life — it should attack it, shake it, and send it home with its hair rearranged.

Keep browsing: See more Non-Fiction books Other books by Antonin Artaud