Surrealist theatre was not received with great enthusiasm by the critics. For the most part, they seemed to keep it at arms length, not wishing to condone such uncivilized displays on the stage and continually asserting that it must only be a passing phase in the dramatic development—a disquieting anomaly. They, like many audience members of the time, seemed almost frightened by the surrealists’ intuitive exploration of the nature of the subconscious. In The Surrealist Mind, John Herbert Matthews analyzes this instinctive reaction, writing, “Among those who do not comprehend surrealism are people who look upon the real as verifiable, as something to be checked against past experience or observation. These individuals fail to see that for the surrealist the dimensions of the real cannot be gauged by reference to the familiar. So far as the real appears to have limits, they are foisted upon it by the mental, emotional, and imaginative limitations of spectators accustomed to measure the possible by the already known. For this reason, surrealism and many of its contemporary opponents remained inevitably at loggerheads. The one group insisted on estimating the scope of reality by its possibilities. The other condemned the real to be repetitive of what the past had shown them.”
During World War II, Surrealism was gradually absorbed by more successful movements such as the Theatre of the Absurd. After the chaos and uncertainty of this catastrophic global war, most people became more willing to accept the inexplicable onstage, for they were familiar with the absurdity of the human condition, having experienced it first hand. Many of the surrealists’ ideals were also carried on by former members of the movement such as Antonin Artaud who wrote in The Theatre and Its Double: “The theatre will never find itself again … except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitate of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. In other terms, the theatre must pursue by all its means a reassertion not only of all the aspects of the objective and descriptive external world but of the internal world; that is, of man considered metaphorically.”