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Antonin Artaud 

 Antoine Christina Joseph Artaud was born on the 4 September 1896 and he died on the 4 March 1948. He was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. Antonin Artaud suffered from bouts of chronic depression and in 1916 he was sent into the French army but relieved due to a self induced habit of sleep walking. After which he was prescribed some drugs to help him which ended up turning into a lifelong addiction to other opiates as well as the prescribed medication. 
He moved to Paris to peruse a career as a writer and found his love for the theatre. He believed that theatre should represent reality- and affect the audience as much as possible. Obviously, he had a different view of the world as other people as he had had a lot of negative things happen to him. 
So to affect the audience he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound and other elements.  
He started something that we all know as 'The Theatre of Cruelty' however by cruelty he didn't mean exclusively sadism, pain and violence but sheer determination and shatter 
this false world we call reality. 

Artaud's aim was that a performance should make an audience member look deep inside themselves and look at their own fears whereas Brecht's techniques was to make an audience member look outside themselves and at society- examining political affairs and so on. Artaud's rehearsal process was normally extremely tiring as he asked his actors to look inside his/her primal emotions to help create a role. He liked to explore the use of sounds to express emotion and even dialogue such as: grunts, screams, cries. 

However, all of his work was extremely influential on modern theatre and his techniques are still widely used today to help create characters.