SCENES from the life of a misunderstood Modernist, No. 10: When Antonin Artaud visited Ireland in the late 1930s, he was clapped into Mountjoy Prison for vagrancy, deported to his native France, and incarcerated in an asylum. Sixty years later, the Project Arts Centre in Dublin is making amends for this breach of hospitality with a four-week season of theatre, called Electroshock, which celebrates the pervasive - posthumous - influence of Artaud's work and ideas.
Generally more alluded to than read, the diverse writings of Artaud - poems, essays, manifestos, scripts - are somewhat heavy going and oracular; he tends to be acknowledged by theatre practitioners with a respectful nod, in the same breath as other theorists of modernist theatre such as Meyerhold and Grotowski. In the 1960s, the English director Peter Brooke devised a "theatre of cruelty" season in homage to Artaud, whose reputation was given a further boost by his espousal by the French cultural critic Michel Foucault.
It is Artaud's conception of a "theatre of cruelty that is the starting point for the Projects eclectic season, co-ordinated by Bedrock Theatre Company. Cruelty in this sense does not necessarily imply sadism or violence, but denotes an intensity of expression, a pitiless, rigorous, exploration of thresholds of pain and suffering, and the paring down of the actors' performances to facilitate honest communication, using precise, defined, tightly disciplined gestures and movements.
"We are taking a risk here, but it's beginning to make a lot of sense," says Jimmy Fay of Bedrock excited and drained after a complete run-through of all the season's plays, back-to-back. The programme includes two Beckett plays: Catastrophe and What Where, two by Heiner Muller: Obituary and Waterfront Wasteland Medea Material Landscape With Argonauts, Edward Bond's iconoclastic, unpredictable Early Morning, and two new, specially-commissioned plays: Anna's Ankle by Mark O'Rowe, and Forked by Gavin Kostick.
"We are expecting the audience to meet us half-way and do a bit of work as well," says Jason Byrne, who directs Muller's Medea Material, which has never before been performed here. Based on the Greek story of Medea, as dramatised by Euripides and Seneca, it is, Byrne says, "a cry of pain, in which myth and history overlap".
When the playwright and director Gavin Kostick first read Artaud as an undergraduate, he thought it was "rubbish", but now, after a few years spent writing and directing for the stage, "it makes complete sense". Artaud is "declaring war on rationality. Most plays have a superficial logic, a stage reality, whereby certain conventions are accepted. Artaud has made a jump from false rationality to a real irrationality, and what you realise, on re-reading him, is that he's actually doing in his prose what he advocates for the stage - pushing our limits, reaching the `nerve ends' of body and soul. His writing is another kind of performance.
The automatic association of Artaud with "physical theatre" is questioned by Mark O'Rowe, whose play, Anna's Ankle, directed by John O'Brien, takes the form of a monologue, "about something that could happen to any of us", with the emphasis on the spoken word. "Artaud is open to interpretation, O'Rowe says, and even though my play is language-based, with the minimum of lighting and stage effects, it is still physical - the gestures are controlled."
Did someone mention laughs. Yes, there will be laughter, these writers and directors promise. Not the nervous, embarrassed variety, but the laughter that comes, Jimmy Fay says, from "danger, vulnerability, exposure..."
