The focus of Artaud and His Doubles is Antonin Artaud: poet, theorist, playwright, director, madman, and—as Kimberley Jannarone contends—fascist. This contention is intended as a challenge to Artaud's followers and admirers, many of whom view the man and his work through the lens of 1960s radicalism, revering him as an icon of individual revolt. For American theatre scholars and practitioners, Artaud stands as an inspiration to experimentalism and liberation; for French philosophers, not least Foucault and Derrida, he offers a profound, tormented reflection on human suffering and inhuman oppression, while his eclectic Oeuvres complètes exemplify the fragmentary, fluid nature of text. He is, in short, an icon of the Left.

Jannarone, however, conceives Artaud's significance in different and darker terms. In a lively and provocative study, she charts her own mental journey from the (now orthodox) eulogy of Artaud on the Left to a critical assessment of his writings and productions in the light of comparable initiatives in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Artaud's admirers have, she argues, often tended to focus on the later years of his life, notably his period of creativity from 1943 onward. In contrast, Jannarone throws light on his lesser-known role as a director (during 1926–8 he wrote, designed, and produced plays in his own Théâtre d'Alfred Jarry), concentrating particularly on his essay “The Theatre and Its Double,” written in 1931–5 and published in 1938. This essay, a small but significant element in collected works that run to tens of thousands of pages, provides both the structure and focus of Jannarone's study. Her contention is that Artaud's real “doubles” are to be found not among 1960s radicals, nor even among 1920s dadaists and surrealists, but among interwar, right-wing partisans of a vitalist new order, fascist proponents of people's theatre, and theorists of authoritarian leadership and rigorous crowd control in both theatre and politics. She further argues that the real character of Artaud's work can be discerned only through a proper contextualization of writings, rather than through their ahistorical (and overly reverential) treatment. Jannarone's claim for originality is therefore twofold: her work offers a new, close reading of Artaud's work in its historical context, and a reassessment of its political character.

The approach and argument of Artaud and His Doubles are both stimulating and fruitful, and this is a book that will prove thought provoking not only for Artaud scholars but also for cultural historians of interwar Europe. Jannarone presents a sustained and critical comparison of Artaud and the avant-garde while also making connections with dramatic theories and practices across interwar Europe, thereby offering a composite and profound reflection on the relationship between theatre and politics in this period. She explores, for example, how Artaud's conception of the “Theatre of Cruelty” both mirrors and diverges from the aspirations of avant-garde colleagues, with its passive audience and strictly codified behavior but striking differences in the conception of political and theatrical regeneration. While left-wing agitprop theatre might envisage the destruction of the existing order in favor of a new utopia, Artaud's theatre projected an image of a corrupt world without hope of redemption. Far from sharing a left-wing call for empowerment, Artaud's theatre treated the audience as a malleable mass or crowd, to be manipulated through emotion rather than intellect, and with a final aim of collective hypnosis (“The destruction of individual consciousness represents the highest notion of culture,” as Artaud wrote in Mexico in 1936) (123). Through a fascinating exploration of Artaud's brief period as director of the Théâtre d'Alfred Jarry, Jannarone also suggests a somewhat terrifying convergence between theory and practice: his fantasies for total control led even his actors to fear for their safety onstage. Her hard-hitting conclusion lays bare the brutal worldview at the center of such theories and theatre: a primitive hunger for the annihilation of others—and of the self.

Yet Jannarone's approach and argument also present interesting challenges to the reader. While historians in particular will be sympathetic to what is essentially an endeavor to contextualize a literary work, they may be surprised by the limitations Jannarone imposes on her project. They may wonder, for instance, why Artaud's work is considered in the context of World War I and with regard to Italian and German theorists, but not in specific relation to the politics of 1930s France. They may question why there is such detailed identification of European influences on Artaud's thought, yet so little discussion of the personal exchanges, readings, and correspondence that must also have nourished his perspective. These lacunae no doubt arise from Jannarone's deliberate decision “to respect a boundary between an analysis of ideas and structures and an analysis of a man—although Artaud himself did not respect these boundaries” (xi). An understandable wish to move away from previous biographical studies, this nonetheless has the effect of leaving “The Theatre and Its Double” seeming somewhat disembodied, lacking a grounding in its most immediate and personal context. Equally, although Jannarone argues very convincingly for the fluidity of ideas in this period, there is a concurrent assumption that fascism and the avant-garde remain entirely distinct, and that Artaud must therefore belong with either one side or the other. Historical research over the past twenty years has, however, tended to challenge this distinction, from Edward Timms and Peter Collier's 1988 assertion that “there is no easy equation between experimental art and progressive politics” (Visions and Blueprints, xi) to more recent explorations of “avant-garde fascism”—notably the 2007 study of that title by Mark Antliff, to which Jannarone briefly refers. If the supposedly avant-garde Artaud could be fascist, this is perhaps also because fascism could be avant-garde—which leads one finally to wonder whether, given the wide-ranging, eclectic, and, in Jannarone's words, “hardly classifiable” nature of Artaud's oeuvre (6), it might not be too restrictive to categorize Artaud within any one political grouping.

None of these observations should, however, detract from the overall impact of this fascinating book. Indeed, such reactions are rather indicative of the lively debate that this stimulating reassessment of Artaud will be certain to provoke.