Staff problem – Frank McNally on the strange Irish pilgrimage of Antonin Artaud

In the cast of eccentrics that populates Christopher McDougall's 2009 best-seller Born to Run, the French writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud makes only a fleeting appearance. This is not because he's running anywhere.

Unlike McDougall, Artaud was not primarily interested in the extraordinary athletic abilities of Mexico’s Tarahumara Indians. He was instead investigating another aspect of their culture, the peyote ritual, involving a supposedly sacred drug derived from a cactus plant and used to induce altered states of consciousness.

The book mentions him in passing only as one of several historical witnesses to the “suicidally steep” and inaccessible terrain of the Copper Canyons, where the Tarahumara live and run. “At best there are a few poorly marked trails that every twenty yards seem to disappear under the ground,” complained the Frenchman during his 1936 visit.

Anyway, this brief mention of Artaud set me trying to find out more about what he did during that trip. Instead of which, I soon found myself reading about another extraordinary journey he made soon afterwards.

Star Trek – Frank McNally on the Hamilton Walk

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Don Juan’s date with destiny – Frank McNally on another great liberator with Kerry roots

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Ring Cycle – Frank McNally on Brendan Behan and the Fáinne wearers

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One-way graphic – Frank McNally on the south-facing statues of Dublin’s main street

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That too involved a famously remote area of savage landscape and difficult roads: Connemara. It was also an attempt to connect with an ancient past, although there were no cactus plants involved this time. If anything, the story may have involved an ash plant, or something such.

At any rate, when Artaud travelled to the island of Inis Mór (having first landed at Cobh) in August 1937, he was carrying a much- knotted walking stick, about which he had extraordinary ideas.

The stick was acquired from a friend who had in turn received it from a Belgian painter. To Artaud, however, it had mystical origins. It was nothing less, he believed, than the Bachal Isu, once carried by St Patrick but deriving its name – “the staff of Jesus” – from an earlier and even more illustrious owner.

The Bachal Isu was long one of the most treasured relics of Christian Ireland, held variously in Armagh and Ballyboghil (which takes its name from it), and finally in Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral.

It was popularly believed to confer great powers on those wielding it. Which is why, in 1537, it was taken from the cathedral to nearby Skinners Row by the iconoclastic Archbishop George Browne and publicly burned as a relic of superstition.

However Artaud believed the staff to have devolved into his keeping, he was on a mission to return it to its ancient roots. His visit to the Aran Islands was a spiritual prelude, in part influenced by an interest in JM Synge. But after a stay in Galway city, he travelled on to Dublin, where he spent some time in a hostel for the homeless at Back Lane, thereby revisiting the scene of the archbishop’s arson.

Then, somewhere in the city, he lost the stick. Writing in this newspaper 60 years later, Peter Collier suggested it was probably taken from him by members of the Garda, who found him in a destitute and distressed state.

Back in Paris several months later, Artaud would write to the Irish legation asking to be allowed return to Ireland to find property he had left with “the most honourable police of Mr de Valera”. But his previous stay had ended with arrest, six days in Mountjoy, and deportation. He was not allowed to return and the whereabouts of his Bachal Isu were already unknown.

Born in Marseilles in 1896, Artaud had been dogged in childhood by physical ill-health and later by mental problems, complicated by addiction to laudanum and other opiates.

His visit to Tarahumura country was traumatic partly because of severe withdrawal symptoms from heroin, his last supply of which he had abandoned just beforehand. On Inis Mór, where islanders called him “An Franncarín beag” (“the small little Frenchman“), he was seen as a sick man who had recently endured some great crisis.

But he was also by then an enormously influential figure in European theatre and, despite frequent periods of instability, would continue to be during the remaining decade of his life.

His best-known book, explaining the “Theatre of Cruelty” (in which “violent physical images crush and hypnotise the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces”) came out soon after his Irish trip, in 1938.

Admirers included Samuel Beckett, whose breakthrough as a dramatist came with the staging of Waiting for Godot by Roger Blin, "a disciple of Artaud's". And in keeping with a man who has disciples, he was also seen as someone whose life formed a chronological watershed.

"The course of all recent serious theatre in Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods," wrote Susan Sontag: "before Artaud and after Artaud."