Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud was a french theatre director, playwright and actor. Born in 1898. Artaud was an authentic revolutionary voice in post war theatre and europian theatre. His theatre work and art was a manifesto for how he believed theatre should be and was different to the conventional theatre at the time. His work was extremely abstract and this challenge people , he began to change peoples perception of theatre could be. 
As a child he was very sick a lot of the time for example at the age of 4 he had a bad spell of meningitis, this lead on to a long history of disorders and mental illness. He spent a lot of time in mental asylums.

“I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.”      
Antonin Artaud 

From this quote you can see that Artaud was quite a disturbed and dark person and this was almost always implemented in his work. However he often described the madmen to be the hidden genius's and i would agree with his comment. Although some would perceive him as mad, i would perceive him as highly intelligent and creative - a genus in his own right.