Horror theatre is barbarous, or at least it should be. It exists to play upon and excite the most barbarous elements of its audience’s character, and in doing so to reflect upon the persistence of this barbarity. André de Lorde, the “Prince of Terror” and chief writer at the notorious Théâtre du Grand-Guignol asked ‘don’t we derive acute pleasure at the circus or music hall from watching the most dangerous feats?’ He confesses that:

If I perspire with anxiety as I follow the movements of the dancer along the tightrope, if my breathing stops with the music when this young person in pink tights is about to attempt what she herself calls the death leap, it is because I actually imagine an atrocious death for her, her battered corpse bloodying the sand in the ring.

As an audience member in a horror play, perhaps one of the 150 or so which the De Lorde wrote in his lifetime, we experience a similar sensation. In the theatre, however, when we’ve bought our ticket to the Grand Guignol we know for certain that the dancer will fall. It is our disbelief, rather than the dancer, which is suspended, but ultimately we are baying for the same blood. The substance of a horror play may confound expectations, the audience may not know who will survive or what will be left of them, but they can be sure that the blade will fall: they have been promised a sacrifice. The contract between audience and performers in a horror play is simple: they have come to watch them suffer, they expect to see them die. It’s what they paid for, after all.

EJ Martin as Rohanna von Baildon in Revenge of the Grand Guignol.

The Grand Guignol had been keeping up its end of the bargain for almost 50 years before Antonin Artaud published his theories of theatre as Dionysian rite, and though its own theatre of cruelty is not Artaud’s, there are similarities in both intention and effect. Artaud spoke of a theatre of illusory worlds which reveal an internal reality, a double of ‘another archetypal and dangerous reality’. There are few plays of the 20th century that demonstrate these concepts as clearly as De Lorde and Alfred Binet’s Un crime dans une maison de fous, which premiered at the Grand Guignol in 1925, and in which a young girl is trapped in an asylum and menaced by three strange avatars of age and malice. On one level it is a terrifying and absurd vignette with a brutal conclusion, but a more sinister and obscure psychological reality swirls beneath its surface. De Lorde would return to these themes time and time again, to the twinning of madness and violence, of the illusion of the theatre and the delusion of nightmares. Like Poe before him and Artaud ahead, De Lorde saw horror and violence as necessary vehicles for certain abominable aspects of reality.

There is sympathetic magic in the Grand Guignol, violence as a purgative for negative emotion. Artaud’s theatre took much from the horror shows of Paris; it took an obsession with crime and criminal violence from the rosse plays of the Théâtre Libre and from the Grand Guignol. Like the directors of the Grand Guignol, Artaud understood the centrality of catharsis to the theatre, but also that the concept of catharsis itself is so often a cheap bourgeois dodge, and that there is something more troubling and obsessional about the enactment of violence onstage.