Layer I — Read it in panels
Chapter 1
Paris, 10 December 1896. The Théâtre de l’Œuvre. A 23-year-old named Alfred Jarry steps out in front of the curtain.
The actor Firmin Gémier, as Père Ubu, opens his mouth. One mangled obscenity — “Merdre!” — and the house erupts for fifteen minutes.
Painted backdrops show palm trees and snow at once. A man holds a sign to tell you where you are. Realism is dead on arrival.
In the audience, W. B. Yeats writes: “After us the Savage God.”
Chapter 2
August Strindberg once wrote the most naturalistic play in Europe: Miss Julie. Then came his Inferno crisis.
Now he writes as dreams are built: “Time and place do not exist… the characters split, double, multiply, evaporate.”
In A Dream Play, a daughter of the god Indra descends to Earth. A castle grows out of manure. A door hides the secret of life — behind it, nothing.
“Human beings are to be pitied.”
Chapter 3
War is coming. The young German writers do not want to show the world. They want to show the soul screaming at the world.
Characters lose their names. They become The Cashier, The Son, The Man, The Woman. Speech breaks into Telegrammstil — clipped bursts.
Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight: a bank clerk steals, runs, and finds only emptiness until he dies in the shape of a cross.
On film, the painted crooked streets of Caligari (1920) spread the look across the world.
Chapter 4
1917: Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias. In its preface he coins a word — surrealism.
André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto calls for “pure psychic automatism.” Freud is in the air.
Antonin Artaud demands a Theatre of Cruelty: not blood, but a shock to the nervous system, “a theatre that wakes us up.”
The world has been broken apart. Theatre will never fully put it back.