#theatre and its double

“But if a major scourge is needed to make this frenzied pointlessness appear and if that scourge is called the plague, we might perhaps attempt to determine the value of this pointlessness in relation to our whole personality. The condition of a plague victim who dies without any material destruction, yet with all the stigmata of an absolute, almost abstract disease upon him, is in the same condition as an actor totally penetrated by feelings without any benefit or relation to reality.
Everything in the actor’s physical aspect, just as in the plague victim, shows life has reacted to a paroxysm, yet nothing has happened. Between the shrieking plague-ridden who run in pursuit of their imaginings, and actors in pursuit of their sensibility, between a living man who invents characters he would never have thought of dreaming up without the plague, bringing them to life amidst an audience of corpses and raving lunatics, and the poet who inopportunely invents characters entrusting them to an equally inert or delirious audience, there are other analogies which account for the only important truths, placing theatre action, like that of the plague, on a par with a true epidemic.”
~Antonin Artaud (May he be blessedly drunk in the halls of Dionysos.)