Thinking about Artaud and one of my favourite plays The Changeling…
The Theatre of Cruelty’s advantage as a stylistic genre is that it allows pre-existing existing plays to be considered in a new, and often more challenging, context, none more so than the sell-out production of The Changeling at the Young Vic theatre in 2012. This Jacobean tragedy is known as an example of the struggle against the patriarchal domination of the seventeenth century, but its latest performance – brain child of Joe Hill-Gibbins, the Deputy Artistic Director of the Young Vic– takes on a much more Artaudian persona, allowing the production to become the centre of a bone-chilling exposé of mental illness and life in an asylum. This emphasis on the subplot about “madmen and fools” is almost too close to Artaud, who spent most of his later life in asylums, suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia. http://www.nouse.co.uk/2013/03/05/the-movements-the-theatre-of-cruelty/
http://fromthecomfortofyourticket.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/review-the-changeling-young-vic/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9707945/The-Changeling-Young-Vic-London-review.html
