with Dr Tomas Elliott and Dr Chloe Yale Pinto
Content Information: violence, nudity, and sexual content
What connects cruelty, love, and the purpose of theatre? Join me as I speak with British theatre specialists Dr Tomas Eliott and Dr Chloe Yale Pinto and try to figure out Antonin Artuad’s The Spurt of Blood, a very short play written in 1925 but never performed in the playwright’s lifetime. It is famously known as being ‘unstageable’. It contains immense destruction and depravity in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, lightning, and, of course, ‘an immense spurt of blood’. Dialogue is sparse and the staging is surreal. The play is part of Artuad’s wider concept of the theatre of cruelty, and it explores creation and destruction. It’s a challenge to coherently summarize the play, but, in short, it involves a Young Man and a Young Girl, a Knight in a full suit of armor, and a Wet-nurse. They fight, both among themselves, with the elements, and with a host of other characters, and natural and unnatural disasters rain down on them.
Radical Writing Podcast 