Artaud conceives theatre in its magic relationship with reality and danger as noted in The Theatre and its Double. When the aim of theatre became the horizontal representation of the real, theatre ceased to exist. To bring theatre back to life it is necessary to have done with representation, starting to walk on the alchemical initiation path that leads to a theatre made of pure presence and governed by cruelty. The beginning of this path consists in several aspects: the parricide, which is the original act of cruelty; the suppression of the logos and God, confuting the existence of a pure origin; the foundation of a new theatrical language which grounds on the supremacy of the act brought to its limit; the overcoming of any dichotomy i.e. alchemic theatre and the subjectile, and the end of the subjugation of theatre by the text, by the author, by the characters, by the stage, by the repetition.

This new language should be inspired by the hieroglyphs, whose magical and exorcistic value is rooted in their rhizomatic connection between visual, phonetic, plastic elements and the Body Without Organs (Artaud). To establish these relations, it is essential to free the power that language exercises over the body through the actualisation of the potentiality of the voices—as mentioned by Artaud in To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1947) or Demetrio Stratos in Cantare la Voce (1978). The voice takes place before the birth of language, and like the child who cannot yet speak, the voice can emit any phoneme, eradicating the separation between signifier and signified, between concept and sound— discussed by Jacques Derrida in “The Theatre of Cruelty and The Closure of Representation” in Mimesis, Masochism, & Mime – The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought. 

The hieroglyph may be indicated as the new theatrical writing since it is a visual and plastic materialisation of speech which is manipulated like a solid object (Artaud). This quality of hieroglyphs needs to be explained through the overturning of Platonism pursued by Gilles Deleuze, in which the ideas are to be conceived as immanent and intrinsically intensive pure “becomings” rather than Platonic transcendental fixed identities. When ideas reach a certain threshold of intensity, they trigger an independent circuit of sensation, habit, memory and understanding—explored in The Hermeneutic Deleuze by Ramey Roshua— becoming sensitive in form of a sign, and the hieroglyph actualises the unity between sign and sensation and is the simulacrum of itself becoming solid. Being the simulacrum of one’s self implies that the form becomes as deep as the real, immanently actualising the infinite potential relations of reality in itself, which is also conceived as a simulacrum.Thence, the repetition is not applicable in the field of analogy, inasmuch as the simulacrum is neither the copy nor the model. Yet, repetition can just be the repetition of a difference that cannot but differ from itself, implying that art, in particular theatre, exits from the domain of representation to enter the field of experience.

Derrida demonstrates that the only possible path that leads to the closure of representation consists in the original repetition of the difference itself, so that the escape from representation is possible only in this very repetition. The origin is not a pure origin as in the Hegelian or Christian Philosophy, rather, in Artaud, it consists in a conflict of forces. These forces are due to the ambiguity of the original act of Cruelty.For example, the parricide, which is not completed in pure presence as it is already in representation and in an unoriginated endless repetition which is again demonstrated by Derrida. 

The fact that Artaud wanted to repeat the parricide one last time as pure presence and outside representation places him at the limit of theatrical possibility as he does not renounce non-repetition without being able to avoid repetition. This aporia is resolved in the limit of the repetition of difference where cruel powers permit presence to be born to itself through the representation in which it eludes itself in its deferral. 

The theory of Theatre of Cruelty and its philosophical implications made it a failure under a practical point of view as Artaud himself admitted. However, the actualisation of theatre of cruelty may not necessarily happen in the theatre. For example, the concept of the subjectile, described by Derrida from the observation of Artaud’s drawings and the act of maddening it share multiple analogies with cruelty and the hieroglyph. The subjectile is placed between below and above, allowing the synergy between the seen and the unseen due to its being neither the object nor the subject, conglomerating all different elements (visual, sound etc.) and genres of art (painting, music etc.). Also, the subjectile may be defined as: “the support, the surface or the material, the unique body of the work in its first event, at its moment of birth, which cannot be repeated, which is as distinct from the form as from the meaning and the representation, here again defies translation.” (Jacques Derrida, “Maddening the Subjectile” in Yale French Studies No. 84). In Artaud’s drawings, the subjectile lies in their pictographic essence is the combustion of written and graphic elements, and in the thought of Artaud himself.

The Italian theatrical actor and director Carmelo Bene can be taken as another example of the subjectile and the cruelty in theatre. Bene’s actorial machine grinds language, characters, subject/object, scenography and conceives the actor as he were constituted by two operators that contradict one the other when the other is still operating. The actualisation of the cruel is the moment when this machine short-circuits, and in the whole work of Bene there are countless moments that embody cruelty, but one in particular is emblematic: the unwrapping of the bandage in ‘Macbeth Horror Suite’ (1996). Bene wears a white bandage on his wrist which he unwraps to show the spectators a wound. The more Bene unwraps it, the more we can see a red spot becoming bigger. When we are about to see the wound as the whole bandage is red, Bene unwraps it one more time and we can see it getting white and finally we see his woundless wrist. This is the end of representation through a sprout of blood (cruelty), the actor-machine (pure presence) and a wound which does not belong anymore to the character, but to the bandage (end of representation, the subjectile). 

You can find here the catalogue of an exhibition of Artaud’s drawing: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_292_300001756.pdf And you can watch here the scene from Macbeth Horror Suite by Carmelo Bene: https://youtu.be/i7fj9AMVQD4?t=133