Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre of the Absurd, as we can discover in the majority of information sources, is a generic term used by critic Martin Esslin for classifying a few specific playwrights, especially Frenchmen, who wrote in fifties as a reaction against traditional concepts of western theatre. These authors have as base the rejection of realist theatre and its characteristic psychological base, the coherent structure, schemes and trust in the dialogical communication. This mania to put everything in boxes, to found for all a place, a sense, a way to understand.
This theatre appears for first time in París streets soon after Second World War and it continues during a hard post-war; that it’s to say a great part of Cold 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. Therefore, authors would want to reflect the situation was living world, an absurd life.
We can see in Literary Encyclopedia similarity between Esslin and Camus (since thanks to this existentialist thinker and Sartre we had this term, which served to Esslin): “Absurdist plays, according to drama historian J.L. Styan, “fall within the symbolist tradition” in their lack of conventional plot and characterisation. Moreover, he elucidates: “Camus’s existentialist use of the term ‘absurd’ in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942) was ten years later vastly narrowed to connote man trapped in a hostile universe that was totally subjective, and made to describe the nightmare that could follow when purposelessness, solitude and silence were taken to the ultimate degree”. Similarly, Esslin contends that Theatre of the Absurd “has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being – that is, in terms of concrete stage images”. Elements from mime, the music hall, circus and commedia del arte were appropriated, particularly in early plays by Beckett; monotony and repetition are emphasised, along with the methods of farce and laughter – with dialogue that seemingly amounts to little more than a series of pointless statements and inconsequential clichés.”
This dramatic movement, which begins to wake in forties of twenty century to sixties end by the hand of authors as Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter and Fernando Arrabal among others, has as motivation origin in Antonín Artaud and Brechtnanian notion (distancing effect) like theoretic sources. While its comedy arise from Charles Chaplin, Marx brothers and Keaton’s films.
Others also find beginnings beyond. In works of “allegorical morality” of the Middle Age, in the literature authors of the not sense like Lewis Carrol, in the works of dream by Strindberg, in James Joyce and Frank Kafka’s works in Alfred Jarry’s grotesque drama, works that had ad direct continuators to the Dadaist and surrealist movement of the years twenty and thirty. According to Gonzalo Cuéllar says actor and director.
However, of course all absurd authors are unique at the same time have similarities. They have a personal style of writing their plays a way more sad (“Waiting for Godot” by Beckett), more distressing (“The lection” by Ionesco), more macabre (“The cemetery of automobiles” by Arrabal) or more violent (“The balcony” by Genet). But as I had said before all share their objective: to pose problems and restlessness through world passes, without to give some answer, leaving thoughts and opinions free, and different and possible representations.
This new movement should be good to show reality, which was not that every people thought, a reality where many people suffered and that had not solved anything while others was playing with people life without to worry for things that were not theirs. A reality that should appear logical and normal, while it was absurd, as in all wars, innocent people would have fight for others in a personal war that was not related to them. It’s to say few persons would control lives of rest of people, or majority of people would have to do that a minority want.
Bibliography:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
-http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Absurd.htm
-http://mural.uv.es/visana/theabsurd.htm
-http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=12
-http://www-ni.laprensa.com.ni/archivo/2004/enero/17/literaria/kiobionice/
-http://www.escaner.cl/escaner18/teatro.htm
-Microsoft Encarta 2005