Since his death eighteen years ago, Artaud's fame has steadily increased. Everyone claims him as predecessor; literary magazines and theatre programs propagate his name; he is quoted as having said things which he never said and he is used as a front for the worst eccentricities. After the Rimbaud myth we have the Artaud myth; to expose the hoax we need a new Etiemble.

In the meantime, Gallimard's careful publication of Artaud's complete works puts into our hands an objective tool to evaluate texts which have been distorted by faddism. The six volumes published so far have already set straight a number of wrong judgments. Volume III revealed Artaud's creativity in cinema; until then, film historians knew Artaud only as an actor. They barely mentioned the one film he had directly inspired, The Shell and the Clergyman [see p. 173], and dismissed it as unimportant.

The reconstructed theatre, using every technical means at its disposal, will work with film, so that scenes played by the actor on stage can alternate with scenes he has played on screen. Going further, a dramatic production could become a kind of revue in which the actor uses dramatic, operatic, and film methods, as well as those of the ballet dancer, acrobat, gymnast, clown. And, of course, the play's division into acts, the inflexibility of conventional dramatic structure, must be superseded by episodes after the model of Shakespeare and the dramatists of the old Spanish theatre, making it possible to abandon the antiquated pseudo-classical unities of time and action. We are entering upon a new phase of playwriting. We are creating a new kind of play.