Antonin Artaud spent nearly a decade in psychiatric asylums and battled a severe lifelong opiate addiction, yet critics call him the dividing line of modern art. This deep dive explores how his abrasive, chaotic brilliance shattered the polite conventions of Western performance.

From a fragile childhood in Marseille to the Paris avant-garde, Artaud clashed with directors and surrealists alike in pursuit of a theatrical language that did not yet exist. We follow his Theater of Cruelty, his chaotic global journeys, his confinement and electroshock therapy, and his final defiant works.

• How early medicalization framed his natural experience as disease
• His break with the surrealists over political revolution
• The Balinese dance that inspired his Theater of Cruelty
• His banned 1948 radio broadcast To Have Done With the Judgment of God
• His influence on philosophy, poetry, and punk rock after his death