Cruelty and psychological distress

الملخص EN

First World War affects dramatists and urges them to revolt against the old traditions.

They start to suspect the existing social structures that increased the universal conflict.

Through Theatre of Cruelty, they can release human unconscious, his mental suffering and exposed man to himself.

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) is the first one who puts a theory for the theatre of cruelty that based on customary and imaginary things.

This form of theatre attacks the audience's subconscious in an effort to permit the deep-rooted fears and worries that are normally repressed.

This theatre focuses on brief text, screams, cries and symbolic gestures in order to shock the audience and stimulate their response.

The use of the body and the voice with the violent, frightening and shocking images is to improve truth.

In Equus (1973) Peter Shaffer (1926) presents violence and fears in a way that affects the audience greatly through creating a violent atmosphere in the mind with some aspects of Artaud's vision of cruelty.

He asserts that the abnormal repression of wishes and instincts in a person can cause mental illness which is not biological but psychological abnormal that society and family values are responsible for it.

Hence, the repressed feelings and instincts not only cause man's mental illness and his destruction but push him to commit an irrational and very violent act in turn he it will turn him to be a killer.