In striking contrast to the serene everyday life of Luxembourg, the most prosperous city in the Benelux, where public transport is free and the average salary is €6,000, the exhibition “Theatre of Cruelty” opened at the art forum Casino Luxembourg. The theatre of cruelty does not begin at the cloakroom. On the contrary, the former casino building, where respectable Luxembourgers once risked their 100 francs without Dostoevsky extrims, was transformed in 1996 into a bright, experimental space for contemporary art. Anyone familiar with the work of the French writer, dramatist, actor, and theatre theorist Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) will understand that a true horror is about to unfold, as the exhibition draws directly on his concept of théâtre de la cruauté. Developed in the 1930s, Artaud’s theatre did not aim for polished fiction but sought the spiritual purification of the spectator through the body, the senses, and extreme emotions – like an exorcism or an ancient ritual. For Artaud, “cruelty” did not mean bloodshed but relentless intensity – a demand to confront existence in its rawness, suffering, ecstasy, and proximity to death, which in a world where pain is aestheticised feels more urgent than ever.
The entire exhibition space is shrouded in heavy black curtains, echoing Artaud’s insistence that theatre must take place within a magical field that dissolves the boundary between actor and spectator. There is no fixed stage, no frontal view. The visitor enters an almost enclosed space where action happens everywhere and nowhere. To enter is to step between the curtains, to find oneself behind the scenes of being, where the theatre of cruelty unfolds. In this space of masks, the visitor becomes a participant, absorbed in the ritual, surrounded by voices, theatrical mechanisms, totems, and ghosts. The exhibition’s soundtrack is utterly magical, perceived by the viewer on the subtlest level as part of the ritual. This is the work One Hundred Nine Minus (2021) by the Chinese artist Pan Daijing (b.1999), a nerve-racking score of voices, laments, guttural prayers, hissing, and glossolalic fragments layered over similar distortions. At the centre of the exhibition are her massive black expanses – boards executed in chalk and acrylic, Cream Cut 1 and Cream Cut 2 (2024–2025) – traces, inscriptions left by her body in trance-like states, illegible automatic writing, a deconstruction of language. They form a topography of the states into which she and her fellow artists immersed themselves, in conditions of melancholy, exhaustion, delirium, and anxious inner struggle.
The original work from Marseille, Artaud’s hometown, “L’Homme et sa douleur”, is one of his late works on paper, executed in graphite and wax pencil – an exact biography of the actor and dramatist whose life was one of endless mental and physical suffering. Yet from this pain emerged truly brilliant creativity. The postwar mobilisation to rebuild Europe and the subsequent prosperous “fat” years left his works largely overlooked, except for director Jerzy Grotowski, perhaps Artaud’s most devoted follower. But the twenty-first century has brought them back into the light. Contemporary artists actively draw inspiration from his ideas in their performative practices, as demonstrated by the exhibition at Casino Luxembourg. The body becomes theatre, and theatre a metaphysical space where gods, cruelty, and electricity converge. The entire oeuvre of director Romeo Castellucci embodies Artaud’s ideas in our time. The exhibition helped me understand more deeply why I never miss any of his productions and why they continue to haunt me for weeks, despite the occasionally traumatic experience. This is the theatre of cruelty.
In his childhood, Antonin Artaud suffered from meningitis, chronic pain, and nervous disorders. Combined with an acute hypersensitivity to the world, these conditions drove him into states of delirium and madness. He spent almost ten years of his life in psychiatric institutions, undergoing harsh electroshock treatments – in Rodez, at one of the hospitals in the 1940s, he created a drawing under the influence of the then-popular sadistic treatments. Yet from this extremity emerged one of the most uncompromising visionaries of modernism – an essayist and theorist who rejected all systems and doctrines and demanded the revival of art as a sacred ritual.
His manifestos, written in the 1930s, shattered the polite fictions of Western theatre, condemning the tyranny of text and narrative and calling instead for a theatre of pure intensity – a theatre of bodies, forces, screams, and convulsions. For Artaud, cruelty was never sadism or spectacle but the relentless rigor of existence itself, an unyielding necessity that shapes life, death, desire, pain, and ecstasy. His theatre sought to bypass intellect and strike directly at the nerves, the senses, and the flesh. To witness it was to undergo initiation, to find oneself among forces that destroy language, personality, and the world. In this vision, the stage was not a stage at all but a metaphysical battlefield where the sacred and the profane were compressed into one continuous spasm.
Equally striking, and not without a shiver, is the surreal work “Truly Horrible Solitude” (2024) by the French duo Angélique Aubrit (b. 1988) and Ludovic Beillard (b. 1982). The action unfolds after the collapse of the economic system, in a world where money and property have lost all value. In an abandoned underground labyrinth of offices and endless corridors, weasels torment people to make them believe in a better future. Dolls wander through the ruins of language, caught between farce and despair. In this, the installation echoes Artaud’s rejection of capitalism, systems, and social masks. Cruelty here becomes an absurd revelation of humanity’s attempts to restore meaning in the empty theatre of collapse. The visitor wanders through the labyrinth, encountering strange marginal scenes. Conceptually strong and masterfully executed.
The British artist Ed Atkins (b. 1982) created “Pianoworks 2” (2024), a video in which a digital double of the artist performs Jürg Frey’s “Klavierstück 2”. Pain, considered as both an existential and structural state, pulses through his virtual body. Atkins uses digital simulation not to conceal but to expose the gap between representation and experience. His avatar, simultaneously actor and double, evokes Artaud’s Theatre and Its Double, where theatre does not imitate life but surpasses it, becoming an amplified and dangerous analogue. Of performing this piece, Atkins wrote that it was “a magnificent crisis, an anxiety existing between my roboticness and my trembling humanity.”
It is worth noting the enormous and highly complex work involved in creating the exhibition “Theatre of Cruelty” by Agnes Gryczkowska, a Polish curator, writer, and musician. She has curated exhibitions at LAS Art Foundation and Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, as well as Au-delà (2023) at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris. Agnes also works with young artists as a teacher and mentor at the Royal Danish Academy and the BPA// Berlin programme.