Artaud's Jet de Sang: a Critical Post-Production Analysis

Abstract

Artaud's Jet de Sang is a text of merely eight pages, published in 1925. This work has acquired a reputation of being ‘unperformable’, partly because of the ‘impossible’ scenic actions asked for in the stage directions (e.g. ‘two stars crash into each other, and we see a number of live pieces of human bodies falling down: hands, feet, scalps… with a maddening, vomit-inducing slowness’), partly because the only professional production, by Peter Brook in the London Season of Cruelty in 1964, was judged to have been a total flop (Hunt & Reeve 77). Over the past ten years, I have scrutinized this text time and time again, related it to the theatrical ideas Artaud was professing in the 1920s, and have never quite understood why the play should be considered unperformable. It is a challenging text, yes, but when not interpreted literally it could act as a springboard for an exploration of Artaud's mind and of our own responses to the topics addressed in the play. A group of students with whom I had worked before on a Dada project convinced me that a production of Jet de Sang, despite its reputation, could be contemplated. Nevertheless, at our first group meeting I expressed the view that the alliance between Surrealism and the theatre profession had been a failure in the past and that it was unlikely to succeed today without compromising either the fundamental intentions behind Surrealist art or the no less axiomatic notions of ‘quality’ in our contemporary theatre world. To explore Artaud's concept of Surrealist theatre would by necessity force us into taking a decision on whether to be faithful to Artaud's ideas or to produce ‘théâtre-bien-fait’.