What influenced Antonin Artaud to write the things he did?

I believe that Antonin Artaud lived a very interesting, fascinating and depressing life. He suffered from drug addiction and spent many years in a mental institution. I think that as a practitioner Antonin Artaud was very successful and experienced many theatre productions and screen performances. I think he is a very experienced man within his profession as an actor, director, playwright and poet. I believe that the experiences he gained throughout his life gave him the ideas and creativity to direct another play, to write another poem, to act in another show and even write another script. Antonin Artaud believed that theatre should be able to communicate to the audience and also represent reality. Therefore, I believe that Artaud came up with the ideas from the experiences he gained in his life.

At a very young age of around 10 year old Antonin Artaud experienced a lot of death for such a young boy. Both his sister and grandmother both died while he was relatively young and that must have come as a real shock to him. For any young child experiencing death they must have gone through a lot of sadness within their childhood which would then have only caused his depression a get a lot worse while growing up. Therefore, as he has had such a deep and dark childhood he has probably started to get familiar with them type of things which probably inspired him to write or performance them certain things.

Because he experienced at a very young age such drastic things such as death he probably believed more in reality and realistic theatre rather than melo-dramatic and over the top theatre. Antonin Artaud believed that theatre should be horrific and disturbing and very uncomfortable to watch. This was massively influenced into his ‘theatre of cruelty’ as he didn’t want his audience members to shy away from these types of subjects he was exploring.