Teacher: Vicente Forés
Course: Filología Inglesa
I
Date: December – 15th – 2005
The
Theatre of the Absurd ("Le Théâtre de l'Absurde"), this is the
title used to label the theatrical production (plays and playwrights) of a
period of time between 1950 and 1960 aproximately. The term comes from the
philosophy of Albert Camus: in his work “Myth of Sisyphus”,where he connects
the human life with meaningless and absurd things. This theatre was
influenced
by the avant-garde experiments in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and also had the
influence of the horrors of the Second World War, a trauma that showed the
absence of human values.
The
most important writers of this cultural style were Samuel Beckett,
Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Tom Stoppard, Friedrich
Dürrenmatt, Harold Pinter, Fernando Arrabal, Edward Albee, and
others.
The Theatre of
the Absurd is rebelled to conventional theatre, everything becomes
illogical,
surreal and (of course) absurd. The dramatist is an investigator who
tries to
avoid the order of the things, the justice, the psicology, the freedom and,
specially, the language; this is because all that things were
aproximations to
the same traumatic reality.
The
initial situation where the actors are collocated reveal their emotions and
feelings and are based in the visual representation of the objects.
Here, the
language is subordinated to the objects (these objects are the atrezzo
accessories and the decorations, who experiment an extaordinary
importance): “…language had become a
vehicle of conventionalised, stereotyped, meaningless exchanges. Words
failed
to express the essence of human experience, not being able to penetrate
beyond
its surface. The Theatre of the Absurd constituted first and foremost an
onslaught on language, showing it as a very unreliable and insufficient
tool of
communication. Absurd drama uses conventionalised speech, clichés,
slogans and
technical jargon, which is distorts, parodies and breaks down,
(…) objects are much more important than
language in absurd theatre: what happens transcends what is being said about
it.” (Dr.Jan Culík,
2000).
The scene
of the
theatre of the absurd represents often a non-sense world, habited by heavy
objects that hide and dominate the characters. Sometimes the characters
appear
having a civil statement, a family and a job, but they will finish
losing all
these features of the human being; and sometimes the characters will appear
like something of the hidden, for example, a spectre.
The
theatre of the absurd uses visual elements like movements and lights to
create
an atmosphere, “the experience of archetypal human situations”, they are
poetic
images.
Since
this point of view, the Absurd is a brake with the cartesian universe, it is
anti-racionalist, “it negates rationalism
because it
feels that rationalist thought, like language, only deals with the
superficial
aspects of things” and those are not the truth essence of
things.
Bibliography:
www.uv.es/fores/teatrouvp.html
www.docstyles.com/mlacrib.html
The Theatre of the Absurd (Internet
communication via Google)
Martin Esslin, critic (Internet
communication
via Google)