Autor: Jose Sospedra Cánovas
I am going
to analyze the Absurd theatre movement and the main playwrights. The Theatre of
the Absurd' is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin for the work of a
number of playwrights, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. The term is
derived from an essay by the French philosopher Albert Camus. In his 'Myth of
Sisyphus', written in 1942, he first defined the human situation as basically
meaningless and absurd.
The origins of the Theatre
of the Absurd are rooted in the avant-garde experiments in art of the 1920s and
1930s. At the same time, it was undoubtedly strongly influenced by the traumatic
experience of the horrors of the Second World War, which showed the total
impermanence of any values, shook the validity of any conventions and
highlighted the precariousness of human life and its fundamental meaninglessness
and arbitrariness. The trauma of living from 1945 under threat of nuclear
annihilation also seems to have been an important factor in the rise of the new
theatre.
The Absurd
Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the importance of myth and ritual
to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, by
instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish.
The Absurd Theatre hopes to achieve this by shocking man out of an existence
that has become trite, mechanical and complacent. It is felt that there is
mystical experience in confronting the limits of human
condition.
The Theatre
of the Absurd openly rebelled against conventional theatre. Indeed, it was
anti-theatre. It was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless. The dialogue
seemed total gobbledygook. Not unexpectedly, the Theatre of the Absurd first met
with incomprehension and rejection.
One of the
most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language as a means
of communication. 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 shows the language as an informal and insufficient tool of communication.
It wants to show the incapacity of communication, as we can see in the play
“Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett. Absurd drama uses conventionalised
speech, clichés, slogans and technical jargon, which is distorts, parodies and
breaks down. By ridiculing conventionalised and stereotyped speech patterns, the
Theatre of the Absurd tries to make people aware of the possibility of going
beyond everyday speech conventions and communicating more authentically.
Conventionalised speech acts as a barrier between ourselves and what the world
is really about: in order to come into direct contact with natural reality, it
is necessary to discredit and discard the false crutches of conventionalised
language. Objects are much more important than language in absurd theatre. The
Theatre of the Absurd strove to communicate an undissolved totality of
perception - hence it had to go beyond language. Unlike conventional theatre,
where language rules supreme, in the Absurd. Theatre language is only one of
many components of its multidimensional poetic imagery.
The absurd
character is in an absolutely different position. He is not formed by his
surroundings in its own image, he is not tossing about in the flood of life
events and processes. On the contrary, he is isolated, static, and motionless
and thus appears and illustrates himself from inside; he is recognised through
his own picture of the world he puts before us. The whole stage is a symbol
showing the inside mental world of the characters, who are organic parts of it.
The reality of the situation in which the absurd character appears, is a
psychological reality expressed in images that are the outward projection of
states of his mind. That is why the Theatre of the Absurd can be considered an
image of the human being's inner world.
The Theatre
of the Absurd is totally lyrical theatre which uses abstract scenic effects,
many of which have been taken over and modified from the popular theatre arts:
mime, ballet, acrobatics, conjuring, music-hall clowning. Much of its
inspiration comes from silent film and comedy, as well as the tradition of
verbal nonsense in early sound film. It emphasises the importance of objects and
visual experience. The Theatre of the Absurd is aiming to create a ritual-like,
mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of
dreams.
The most
known absurdist playwrights are: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold
Pinter.
Samuel
Beckett is probably the most well known of the absurdist playwrights because of
his work Waiting for Godot. Beckett's plays seem to focus on the
themes of the uselessness of human action, and the failure of the human race to
communicate. Waiting for Godot is probably the most famous absurd
play to date. The characters of the play, are absurd caricatures who of
course have problems communicating with one another, and the language they use
is often times ludicrous. And, following the cyclical pattern, the play
seems to end in the same state it began in, with nothing really
changed.
Along side Beckett in the theatre genre of absurdity, is playwright Eugene Ionesco. Ionesco's main focus is on the futility of communication, so the language of his plays often reflects this by being almost completely nonsensical. He approaches the absurdity of life by making his characters comical and unable to control their own existence.
Although Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco are two of the most famous absurdist playwrights, Harold Pinter is now the leading English language playwright in the genre. In his plays, Pinter never finds in necessary to explain why things occur or who anyone is, the existence within the play itself is justification enough. In general, lack of explanation is what characterizes Pinter's work, that and the interruption of outside forces upon a stable environment. What seems to set him apart though is that unlike Beckett and Ionesco, Pinter's world within the drama seems to be at least somewhat realistic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
_http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Absurd.htm
_http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~sek5/classpage.html
_http://www.samuel-beckett.net
_http://www.uv.es/fores