A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, The Theater and Its Double is the fullest statement of the ideas of Antonin Artaud. We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger, he wrote. He fought vigorously against an encroaching conventionalism he found anathema to the very concept of theater. He sought to use theater to transcend writing, to break through the language in order to touch life. "

Founder of the Theatre of Cruelty and a strong influence on Peter Brook, Artaud dedicated his life and sanity to purging the French theatre of its enervating bourgeois tendencies. This book includes his major writings about theatre.