Artaud's Revolutionary Messages

Published here in its entirety for the first time in English, Messages Révolutionnaires collects Antonin Artaud's political and philosophical writings during his travels to Mexico in 1936.

Written around the same time as his seminal work The Theatre and its Double, it captures a crucial point in Artaud's life shortly before he was admitted to a mental asylum in which he was to spend a significant part of his later life.

Revolutionary Messages contains papers that Artaud gave at the University of Mexico, articles from the daily Mexican newspaper El Nacional Revolucionario and a study of three seminal artists of the time influenced by Mexico - Franz Hals, Ortiz Monasterio and Maria Izquierdo.

Not only will you gain crucial insight into Artaud's time in Mexico and his vision of a 'total revolution' in opposition to Marxist and Surrealist conceptions of revolution at the time, but you will deepen your understanding of his theatrical project, which ultimately shaped modern theatre.

The publication includes an extensive introduction by the translator and a preface by an Artaud scholar, Joel White.

“[Artaud] has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theatre in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods - before Artaud and after Artaud.” —Susan Sontag

“The Theater and Its Double is far and away the most important thing that has been written about the theater in the twentieth century. It should be read again and again. Artaud oozed magical desires. He was the metaphysician of the theater.” —Jean-Loius Barrault

“Artaud remains one of the significant and influential theorists of modern theatre” —Gerald Rabkin, Professor of Theatre, Rutgers University