This week, novelist, non-ficition author and professor of art and film, Stephe Barber, joins us to talk about about Heliogabalus or The Crowned Anarchist.

Fully translated into English for the first time, this remarkable little book was written by avant garde theatre visionary, Antonin Artaud, and is ostensibly based on the two year reign of a teenage emperor that history records as little more than an orgy of sex and violence. However it is also Artaud exploring power, and magic, and spectacle, and mythology, and how one tells history and why.

Really good stuff. Really good, indeed.

Show Notes

• Get Heliogabalus or The Crowned Anarchist.
• Video primer on Artaud's impact on theatre.