THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

This essay is trying to do a general analysis of the theatrical trend known as “Theatre of the absurd”. For that purpose it is necessary to first indicate his origins, influences, possible causes, in which context it appeared, and in which context it remained. We shall obviously talk about the features of this trend and mention the greatest exponents of it.

‘'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’ (1). ‘It emerged in Paris in the plays of Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Tardieu. Writers outside France who show the influence of the theatre of the absurd include Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard in England; Gunter Grass and Peter Weiss in Germany; Edward Albee, Israel Horovitz, and Sam Shepard in the United States; and the Czech playwright-turned-statesman Vaclav Havel.’

‘The term “theatre of the absurd” derives from the philosophical use of the word absurd by such existentialist thinkers as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre. Camus, particularly, argued that humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd.’ (2)

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. (3)

Hamm: We're not beginning ... to ... to ... mean something?

Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something? (4)

Important aspects that we should indicate are the structure of the plot (or maybe we should say “the non-plot”) and the function of the language in absurd plays. ‘The plots often deviated from the more traditional episodic structure, and seem to move in a circle, ending the same way it began. The scenery was often unrecognizable, and to make matters worse, the dialogue never seemed to make any sense.’ (5).

Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, which is probably the most well known absurdist plays, is a good example of that fact. ‘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.’ (6)

‘One of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language as a means of communication’. ‘The Theatre of the Absurd constituted first and foremost an onslaught on language, showing it as a very unreliable and insufficient tool of communication’. ‘The Theatre of the Absurd strove to communicate an undissolved totality of perception - hence it had to go beyond language.’ (7)

All these characteristics of absurdist plays, precisely because of their absurdity and abstract nature , become something incomprehensible ,as the high degree of ambiguity that these plays convey enables the audience to consider several interpretations of them.

A last issue is brought up: Is “Theatre of the absurd” still alive? If not, when does it die? This matter lead us to a necessary geographical and contextual distinction between West European Drama and East European one. ‘While the West European drama is usually considered as having spent itself by the end of the 1960s, several East European authors have been writing highly original plays in the absurdisy mould, well into the 1970s.’ (8)

That distinction also implies some differences in the internal features of the absurd drama. These differences will serve us to conclude.

‘The main difference between the West European and the East European plays is that while the West European plays deal with a predicament of an individual or a group of individuals in a situation stripped to the bare, and often fairly abstract and metaphysical essentials, the East European plays mostly show and individual trapped within the cogwheels of a social system. The social context of the West European absurd plays is usually subdued and theoretical: in the East European plays it is concrete, menacing and fairly realistic’.(9)

‘The Western Theatre of the Absurd highlighted man's fundamental bewilderment and confusion, stemming from the fact that man has no answers to the basic existential questions: why we are alive, why we have to die, why there is injustice and suffering.’(10)

BIBLIOGRAPHY / QUOTATIONS

1,3,7,8,9,10.-http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Absurd.htm

2.- http://members.aol.com/KatharenaE/private/Philo/Existentialism/TA.html

4.- From 'Endgame' by Samuel Beckett

5, 6.- http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~sek5/classpage.html

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