Career
A prolific writer, he wrote more than sixty plays, a hundred stories, a number of articles on art and folklore and more than 20,000 letters. He is the creator of a fantastic and disturbing, often macabre, grotesque and cruel world filled with mannequins, puppets, devils, masks, skeletons, religious paraphernalia, and mysterious old women. His works create an eerie and unsettling atmosphere although they rarely contain anything openly scary.
Among his influences were puppet theater, commedia dell'arte and the Belgian painter of the macabre, James Ensor. His works often deal with the extremes of human experience, from death and degradation to religious exaltation.
His 1934 play La Balade du grand macabre served as inspiration for György Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre.
According to Oscar G. Brockett, the works of Ghelderode resemble those of Alfred Jarry, the surrealists, and the expressionists, and his theories are similar to those of Antonin Artaud. In nearly all of his approximately thirty plays runs his perception of human beings as creatures whose flesh overpowers spirit. "Corruption, death and cruelty are always near the surface, although behind them lurks an implied criticism of degradation and materialism and a call to repentance "
Read more about this topic: Michel De Ghelderode
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