Cannibalism in drama collapses the gap between the performative word and the performance of a text or body. It answers Antonin Artaud's call for a new kind of theatre. He calls this new kind of theatre one of Cruelty, i.e., one that shakes the audience out of passive state vis-à-vis bourgeois, Western, narrative-based theatre. Artaud pushes for a recodified theatrical language that does not depend upon language. His desire to circumvent spoken or written language, however, cannot occur, a fact he even acknowledges as a possibility in his The Theatre and Its Double. Cannibalism accounts for this inability by mediating the gap between performance and the performative. It reconstitutes the body and the spoken and/or written word in such a manner that the two are indistinguishable. Through a study of cannibalism in a selection of twentieth-century dramatic texts, this project suggests that a Theatre of Cannibalism might accomplish what Artaud is after, a life before birth, a consciousness before consciousness.
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