Castellucci's deeply problematic work shows how, 75 years on, those ideas need to be completely rethought. Artaud's ideas, expounded in the 1920s and 1930s, form the basis for most of the theatrical avant-garde. Noting how the catastrophe of the plague had stimulated so much great European art, Artaud said he wanted to create a theatre that would give audiences an equivalent experience, so that 'they will be terrified, and awaken'. Tragedia Endogonidia derives rather obviously from the theories propounded by Antonin Artaud. They found upsetting what I found merely disheartening. So the 30-odd people who walked out of the performance (the largest walkout I've seen in Dublin) were paying the show a rather undeserved compliment. On the night that Romeo Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia opened in Dublin the evening news programmes were showing, along with the usual reports of casual murder, the video of a US aircraft bombing Iraqis with the triumphant war cry 'Dude!' and a Palestinian father clutching a photograph of the daughter shot by the Israeli army while she was baking bread. Tragedia Endogonidia, Samuel Beckett Theatre Irish Times writers review events at the Dublin theatre festivals
