THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
The Theatre of the Absurd, a peculiar genre that flourished in England in the post-war years
and reached its peak in the 1960s. Two of the major voices of this particular genre - the Irish
Samuel Beckett and the English Harold Pinter - were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The expression 'Theatre of the Absurd' was coined in 1961 by Martin Esslin to refer to the
works of a group of European and American playwrights who shared Albert Camus' idea of
human life as absurd and mainly meaningless (as an effect of the Second World War). The
term did not refer to an official movement or group of artists but to the rather heterogeneous
works of artists such as Lonesco (Rumenian, La cantatrice chiave), Beckett (1906-1989),
French Jean Genet, Adamov, and Pinter, whose plays expressed the idea of man's life as
characterized by a lack of meaning and communication. Stylistic features:
- language is often fragmented and playwrights make wide use of pauses and silence;
the value of language is reduced, and contradictions; miming, and farcical situations.
- dialogues are apparently illogical and aimless;
- plots are not logical and defy almost all the conventions of traditional theatre;
- the constant mix between comedy and tragedy frequently characterizes plots;
- ends are usually open;
- actions are mainly pointless, and meaningless;
- relationships among characters are often inconsistent and unclear, as place and
time.
Main themes: the sense of man’s alienation, the cruelty of human life, the absence or the
futility of objectives, and the meaninglessness of man’s struggle.
In one of his writings about the Theatre of the Absurd (1961), the critic Martin Esslin wrote:
“The certitudes have been swept away. The decline of religious faith was masked until the
end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and
various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war. The Theatre of the Absurd
strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition”.
He claimed that their work: “renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition
but presented it in being that is in terms of concrete state images”: absurd language, lack of
plots or conventional characters or logical dialogues.
FWW => fragmentation of values; SWW => fragmentation of drama; people have
witnessed the effect of the Cold War, of the atomic bomb, and of the atrocities of the Nazi
concentration camps. Moreover, in the UK there was a common sense of disillusionment
coming from the realization that Britain has been reduced to a second-class power. New
meaning of existence:
-awareness of man’s propensity to evil and conscience of the destructive power of
scientific progress.
-lack of moral assurance, and the decline of religious faith
- the disillusionment of both liberal and social theories about economic progress.
- mistrust in the power of reason
=> sense of anguish and helplessness especially among young people
French existentialism: saw man trapped in a hostile world, human life was meaningless
and this created a sense of confusion, despair, and emptiness. The universal was not
rational and defied any explanation => Albert Camus, The Myths of Sisyphus (1942): “in a
