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Absurd Drama - Martin Esslin

Introduction to "Absurd Drama" (Penguin Books, 1965)

'The Theatre of the Absurd' has get a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand up for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it volition be best to endeavour to respond the second question get-go. At that place is no organised motility, no schoolhouse of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed nether this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Cool, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement - and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to limited no more than and no less his own personal vision of the world.

Still disquisitional concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise. When the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Adamov first appeared on the stage they puzzled and outraged near critics as well audiences. And no wonder. These plays flout all the standards by which drama has been judged for many centuries; they must therefore appear every bit a provocation to people who accept come into the theatre expecting to find what they would recognize as a well-made play. A well-fabricated play is expected to present characters that are well-observed and convincingly motivated: these plays often contain hardly whatever recognizable human being beings and present completely unmotivated actions. A well-made play is expected to entertain by the ding-dong of witty and logically built-upwardly dialogue: in some of these plays dialogue seems to accept degenerated into meaningless blubbering. A well-made play is expected to take a beginning, a middle, and a neatly tied-up ending: these plays ofttimes commencement at an capricious point and seem to end just as arbitrarily. Past all the traditional standards of of critical appreciation of the drama, these plays are not merely abominably bad, they do not even deserve the name drama.

And yet, strangely plenty, these plays have worked, they accept had an outcome, they have exercised a fascination of their own in the theatre. At first it was said that this fascination was merely a succès de scandale, that people flocked to see Beckett'southward Waiting for Godot or Ionesco'south Bald Primadonna merely because information technology had become fashionable to express outrage and astonishment about them at parties. But this explanation conspicuously could non apply to more ane or ii plays of this kind. And the success of a whole row of similarly unconventional works became more and more than manifest. If the disquisitional touchstones of conventional drama did not apply to these plays, this must surely take been due to a difference in objective, the utilize of different artistic means, to the fact, in brusk, that these plays were both creating and applying a different convention of drama. Information technology is but every bit senseless to condemn an abstract painting because it lacks perspective or a recognizable subject-thing equally it is to refuse Waiting for Godot because it has no plot to speak of. In painting a composition of squares and lines an creative person like Mondrian does not want to draw any object in nature, he does not want to create perspective. Similarly, in writing Waiting for Godot Beckett did non intend to tell a story, he did non desire the audition to become home satisfied that they knew the solution to the problem posed in the play. Hence in that location is no point in reproaching him with not doing what he never sought to do; the only reasonable class is to try and find out what it was that he did intend.

Nonetheless, if tackled directly nearly of the playwrights in question would refuse to discuss any theories or objectives behind their piece of work. They would, with perfect justification, point out that they are concerned with i thing only: to express their vision of the world as best they can, but considering, every bit artists, they feel an irrepressible urge to do so. This is where the critic can stride in. By describing the works that do not fit into the established convention, by bringing out the similarities of arroyo in a number of more or less obviously related new works, by analysing the nature of their method and their artistic effect, he tin endeavour to ascertain the framework of the new convention, and by doing and then, tin provide the standards by which information technology volition become possible to have works in that convention meaningfully compared and evaluated. The onus of proof that there is such a convetion involved clearly lies on the critic, but if he can institute that in that location are basic similarities in approach, he can argue that these similarities must arise from common factors in the experience of the writers concerned. And these common factors must in turn spring from the spiritual climate of our age (which no sensitive creative person tin escape) and also perhaps from a common groundwork of artistic influences, a similarity of roots, a shared tradition.

A term like the Theatre of the Absurd must therefore exist understood as a kind of intellectual shorthand for a complex blueprint of similarities in approach, method, and convention, of shared philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or subconscious, and of influences from a common store of tradition. A characterization of this kind therefore is an assistance to agreement, valid only in so far as information technology helps to gain insight into a work of fine art. It is not a binding classification; it is certainly not across-the-board or exclusive. A play may contain some elements that can best be understood in the light of such a characterization, while other elements in the aforementioned play derive from and tin can best be understood in the low-cal of a dissimilar convention. Arthur Adamov, for instance, has written a number of plays that are prime examples of the Theatre of the Absurd. He now quite openly and consciously rejects this mode and writes in a different, realistic convention. Nevertheless fifty-fifty his latest plays, which are both realistic and socially committed, comprise some aspects which tin can still be elucidated in terms of the Theatre of the Cool (such as the use of symbolic interludes, guignols, in his play Spring '71). Moreover, once a term similar Theatre of the Absurd is defined and understood, it acquires a certain value in throwing calorie-free on works of previous epochs. The Polish critic Jan Kott, for example, has written a bright study of King Lear in the light of Beckett's Endgame. And that this was no vain academic practise but a genuine assistance to understanding is shown by the fact that Peter Brook's slap-up product of Male monarch Lear took many of its ideas from Kott's essay.

What then is the convention of drama that has now caused the characterization of the Theatre of the Absurd?

Allow usa take one of the plays in this book equally a starting point: Ionesco's Amédée. A middle-aged hubby and wife are shown in a situation which is clearly non taken from real life. They have not left their flat for years. The wife earns her living by operating some sort of telephone switchboard; the hubby is writing a play, but has never got beyond the outset few lines. In the sleeping accommodation is a corpse. Information technology has been there for many years. It may be the corpse of the married woman'due south lover whom the hubby killed when he found them together, but this is by no means certain; information technology may also have been a infiltrator, or a stray visitor. Just the oddest thing virtually information technology is that it keeps growing larger and larger; it is suffering from 'geometric progression, the incurable disease of the dead'. And in the grade of the play it grows so large that eventually an enormous pes bursts from the sleeping accommodation into the living-room, threatening to bulldoze Amédée and his wife out of their home. All this is wildly fantastic, all the same it is non altogether unfamiliar, for information technology is not dissimilar situations virtually of us have experienced at 1 fourth dimension or another in dreams and nightmares.

Ionesco has in fact put a dream situation onto the stage, and in a dream quite clearly the rules of realistic theatre no longer utilise. Dreams practise non develop logically; they develop by association. Dreams exercise not communicate ideas; they communicate images. And inded the growing corpse in Amédée can all-time be understood as a poetic image. It is in the nature both of dreams and poetic imagery that they are ambiguous and carry a multitude of meanings at one and the same time, so that it is futile to ask what the image of the growing corpse stands for. On the other hand ane can say that the corpse might evoke the growing power of past mistakes or by guilt, perhaps the waning of love or the decease of affection - some evil in any case that festers and grows worse with fourth dimension. The epitome can stand for whatever and all of these ideas, and its ability to embrace them all gives it the poetic power it undoubtedly posseses.

Non all the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd tin exist described simply equally dreams (although Adamov'south Professor Taranne in this volume actually came to Adamov as a dream, Albee'south Zoo Story is clearly far more firmly anchored in reality) but in all of them the poetic image is the focus of interest. In other words: while most plays in the traditional convention are primarily concerned to tell a story or elucidate an intellectual problem, and tin can thus be seen every bit a narrative or discursive form of advice, the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd are primarily intended to convey a poetic image or a circuitous pattern of poetic images; they are above all a poetical form. Narrative or discursive thought proceeds in a dialectical manner and must lead to a outcome or concluding bulletin; it is therefore dynamic and moves along a definite line of development. Poetry is above all concerned to convey its central idea, or atmosphere, or manner of beingness; it is essentially static.

This does non mean, however, that these plays lack movement: the movement in Amédée, for case, is relentless, lying every bit information technology does in the pressure of the ever-growing corpse. But the situation of the play remains static; the movement we see is the unfolding of the poetic image. The more ambiguous and complex that prototype, the more intricate and intriguing will be the process of revealing it. That is why a play like Waiting for Godot can generate considerable suspense and dramatic tension in spite of being a play in which literally nada happens, a play designed to show that zero tin can ever happen in human life. It is but when the last lines have been spoken and the curtain has fallen that we are in a position to grasp the total pattern of the complex poetic image we have been confronted with. If, in the traditional play, the action goes from point A to point B, and we constantly inquire, 'what'southward going to happen next?', here we take an action that consists in the gradual unfolding of a circuitous pattern, and instead nosotros ask, 'what is it that we are seeking? What will the completed image be when we have grasped the nature of the pattern?' Thus in Arrabal's The Two Executioners in this volume we realise at the terminate of the play that the theme is the exploration of a complex prototype of the mother-son human relationship; in Albee's Zoo Story it is only in the last lines of the play that the idea of the unabridged dialogue betwixt Jerry and Peter falls into place, as an image of the difficulty of advice betwixt homo beings in our world.

Why should the emphasis in drama have shifted abroad from traditional forms towards images which, complex and suggestive as they may be, must necessarily lack the final clarity of definition, the neat resolutions we accept been used to expect? Conspicuously considering the playwrights concerned no longer believe in the possibility of such neatness of resolution. They are indeed chiefly concerned with expressing a sense of wonder, of incomprehension, and at times of despair, at the lack of cohesion and meaning that they detect in the world. If they could believe in conspicuously defined motivations, adequate solutions, settlements of conflict in tidily tied up endings, these dramatists would certainly non eschew them. Just, quite obviously, they have no religion in the existence of and so rational and well ordered a universe. The 'well-made play' can thus be seen equally conditioned by articulate and comforting beliefs, a stable scale of values, an ethical system in full working status. The arrangement of values, the globe-view behind the well-fabricated play may be a religious one or a political one; information technology may be an implicit belief in the goodness and perfectibility of men (as in Shaw or Ibsen) or information technology may be a mere unthinking credence of the moral and political status quo (equally in almost drawing-room one-act). But whatever it is, the basis of the well-fabricated play is the implicit assumption that the world does brand sense, that reality is solid and secure, all outlines articulate, all ends credible. The plays that nosotros have classed nether the label of the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, limited a sense of daze at the absense, the loss of whatever such clear and well-defined systems of beliefs or values.

At that place tin niggling doubt that such a sense of disillusionment, such a collapse of all previously held business firm beliefs is a feature characteristic of our own times. The social and spiritual reasons for such a sense of loss of meaning are manifold and complex: the waning of religious faith that had started with the Enlightenment and led Nietzsche to speak of the 'death of God' past the eighteen-eighties; the breakdown of the liberal faith in inevitable social progress in the wake of the Kickoff World State of war; the disillusionment with the hopes of radical social revolution as predicted by Marx afterwards Stalin had turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian tyranny; the relapse into barbarism, mass murder, and genocide in the course of Hitler's brief rule over Europe during the Second World War; and, in the aftermath of that war, the spread of spiritual emptiness in the outwardly prosperous and affluent societies of Western Europe and the United States. There can be no doubt: for many intelligent and sensitive human beings the world of the mid twentieth century has lost its meaning and has simply ceased to make sense. Previously held certainties have dissolved, the firmest foundations for promise and optimism accept complanate. Suddenly homo sees himself faced with a universe that is both frightening and illogical - in a word, absurd. All assurances of hope, all explanations of ultimate meaning have suddenly been unmasked every bit nonsensical illusions, empty churr, whistling in the dark. If nosotros endeavour to imagine such a situation in ordinary life, this might amount to our suddenly ceasing to understand the conversation in a room full of people; what made sense at one moment has, at the adjacent, become an obscure babble of voices in a foreign linguistic communication. At once the comforting, familiar scene would plow into i of nightmare and horror. With the loss of the means of communication we should be compelled to view that world with the eyes of full outsiders every bit a succession of frightening images.

Such a sense of loss of significant must inevitably atomic number 82 to a questioning of the recognised instrument for the communication of meaning: language. Consequently the Theatre of the Cool is to a very considerable extent concerned with a critique of language, an attack above all on fossilized forms of linguistic communication which accept become devoid of meaning. The converstaion at the political party which at one moment seemed to be an exchange if data virtually the atmospheric condition, or new books, or the respective health of the participants, is suddenly revealed equally an substitution of mere meaningless banalities. The people talking about the conditions had no intention whatever of of really exchanging meaningful data on the subject; they were merely using linguistic communication to make full the emptiness between them, to conceal the fact that they had no desire to tell each other annihilation at all. In other words, from being a noble instrument of genuine communication language has become a kind of anchor filling empty spaces. And equally, in a universe that seems to be drained of significant, the pompous and laborious attempts at explanation that we telephone call philosophy or politics must appear as empty chatter. In Waiting for Godot for case Beckett parodies and mocks the language of philosophy and science in Lucky's famous oral communication. Harold Pinter, whose uncanny accuracy in the reproduction of existent conversation amidst English people has earned him the reputation of having a tape-recorder congenital into his retention, reveals that the bulk of everyday chat is largely devoid of logic and sense, is in fact nonsensical. It is at this point that the Theatre of the Absurd can actually coincide with the highest degree of realism. For if the real conversation of man beings is in fact absurd and nonsensical, then it is the well-made play with its polished logical dialogue that is unrealistic, while the absurdist play may well exist a tape-recorded reproduction of reality. Or, in a world that has become absurd, the Theatre of the Absurd is the most realistic annotate on, the most authentic reproduction of, reality.

In its critique of language the Theatre of the Absurd closely reflects the preoccupation of contemporary philosophy with language, its effort to uncrease language, as a genuine musical instrument for logic and the discovery of reality, from the welter of emotive, casuistic usages, the grammatical conventions that take, in the past, often been confused with 18-carat logical relationships. And equally, in its emphasis on the basic absurdity of the human status, on the bankruptcy of all closed systems of idea with claims to provide a total explanation of reality, the Theatre of the Cool has much in common with the existential philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. (It was in fact Camus who coined the concept of the Absurd in the sense in which it is used here.) This is not to say that the dramatists of the Cool are trying to translate contemporary philosophy into drama. It is merely that philosophers and dramatists answer to the aforementioned cultural and spiritual situation and reflect the same preoccupations.

Nonetheless, however contemporary the Theatre of the Absurd may appear it is by no means the revolutionary novelty as which some of its champions, every bit well as some of its bitterest critics, tend to stand for it. In fact the Theatre of the Absurd can best be understood as a new combination of a number of ancient, fifty-fifty archaic, traditions of literature and drama. It is surprising and shocking merely because of the unusual nature of the combination and the increased emphasis on aspects of drama that, while present in all plays, rarely sally into the foreground.

The ancient traditions combined in a new class in the Theatre of the Absurd are: the tradition of miming and clowning that goes back to the mimus of Greece and Rome, the commedia dell' arte of Renaissance Italian republic, and such popular forms of theatre as the pantomime or the music-hall in Britain; the equally ancient tradition of nonsense poetry; the tradition of dream and nightmare literature that too goes back to Greek and Roman times; emblematic and symbolic drama, such as we find information technology in medieval morality plays, or in the Castilian auto sacramental; the ancient tradition of fools and mad scenes in drama, of which Shakespeare provides a multitude of examples; and the even more ancient tradition of ritual drama that goes back to the very origins of the theatre where religion and drama were nevertheless one. It is no coincidence that one of the masters of the Theatre of the Absurd, Jean Genet, regards his plays as attempts at recaturing the riual element in the Mass itself, which, later all, can exist seen every bit a poetic paradigm of an archetypal event brought to life through a sequence of symbolical actions.

It is against this background that we must see the history of the movement which culminates in Beckett, Ionesco, or Genet. Its immediate forebears are dramatists like Strindberg, who progressed from photographic naturalism to more and more than openly expressionist representations of dreams, nightmares, or obsessions in plays similar the Ghost Sonata, Dream Play, or To Damascus, and novelists like James Joyce and Kafka. A grade of drama concerned with dream-similar imagery and the failure of language was bound to detect inspiration also in the silent movie house, with its dream-like quality and cruel, sometimes nightmare humor. Charlie Chaplin's little man and Buster Keaton'south stonefaced stoic are among the openly acknowledged influences of writers like Beckett and Ionesco. These comedians, later on all, derive from the well-nigh ancient traditions of clowning, as exercise, in the talking cinema, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, or Laurel and Hardy, all clearly part of the tradition which leads to the Theatre of the Cool.

Some other direct and best-selling influence is that of the Dadaists, the surrealists, and the Parisian advanced that derives from writers like Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Jarry's Ubu Roi, commencement performed in 1896, might in fact be called the get-go modernistic example of the Theatre of the Absurd. It is a roughshod farce in which monstrous puppets castigate the greed and emptiness of bourgeois society through a series of grotesque phase images. Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tiresias ('The Breasts of Tiresias') was the starting time play to be labelled by its author as 'a surrealist drama'. Here too the action proceeds through a series of savagely grotesque images; the hero, or rather the heroine, Thérèse-Tiresias changes sex activity past letting her breasts bladder twards the heavens in the shape of two toy balloons. Jarry and Apollinaire were the direct precursors of the Dadaists in Switzerland, France and Germany. Brecht's primeval plays conduct the marks of the Dadaist influence and tin be regarded as early examples of the Theatre of the Absurd: In the Jungle of the Cities for instance presents the audition with a totally unmotivate struggle, a series of poetic images of human fighting a senseless battle with himself. In France the ii leading exponents of surrealism in drama were Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Roger Vitrac (1899-1952). Vitrac'south play Victor ou Les Enfants au Pouvoir (1924) anticipates Ionesco and Arrabal by showing the world from the bespeak of view of a nine-year-old child of giant size and monstrous intelligence. Artaud, who wrote very little in dramatic form himself, is of immense importance equally a theoretician of the new anti-literary theatre: he coined the slogan of the 'Theatre of Cruelty' for his conception of a theatre designed to shock its audience into a full sensation of the horror of the human status. Jean-Louis Barrault and Roger Blin, two of the leading directors of the gimmicky avant-garde theatre, were pupils of Artaud; Arthur Adamov was among his closest friends.

In its present form the Theatre of the Absurd is a mail service-war phenomenon. Genet's The Maids had its starting time performance at the Athénée in Paris in 1947; Ionesco's Bald Primadonna and Adamov'southward earliest plays were first produced in 1950; Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1952. Information technology will be noticed that all these first performances took identify in Paris. And Paris certainly is the fountainhead of the Theatre of the Cool. However it is as strange and pregnant that the playwrights themselves are largely exiles from other countries domiciled in Paris: Beckett (born 1906) an Anglo-Irishman who writes in French; Ionesco (born 1912) half-French and one-half-Rumanian; Adamov (born 1908) a Russo-Armenian. Only Genet is a Frenchman born and bred, but and so he is an exile in a different sense: an exile from society itself, a child abased past his mother, brought upwards by foster-parents and globe-trotting from detention centres for juvenile delinquents into an underworld of thieves and male prostitutes, prison and penitentiary. Information technology is in the experience of the outcast or exile that our image of the world seen from the outside assumes a new and added significance: for the exile, from his country or from society, moves in a earth drained of significant, sees people in pursuit of objectives he cannot comprehend, hears them speak a language that he cannot follow. The exile'south basic experience is the archetype and the anticipation of twentieth-century man'south shock at his realization that the globe is ceasing to make sense.

Of the dramatists of the Absurd Samuel Beckett is undoubtedly the profoundest, the greatest poet. Waiting for Godot and Endgame are certainly masterpieces; Happy Days and Play, Krapp'southward Last Tape, and the ii Acts without Words (where language has drained away altogether) are brilliant and profound poetic images; and the radio plays All that Fall, Embers, Words and Music, and Cascando have an equal enigmatic ability.

Jean Genet (born 1910) lacks Beckett'south discipline, intellect and erudition, but he too is a poet, endowed with the wellnigh magic power of creating beauty from evil, corruption and excrement. If the evanescence of human being in fourth dimension and the mystery of man personality and identity are Beckett's main themes, Genet's main business organization is with the falseness of human pretensions in society, the dissimilarity between appearance and reality, which itself must remain for ever elusive. In The Maids we see the servants leap in a mixture of hatred and erotic dependence to their mistress, re-enacting this love-hate in an countless series of ritual games; in The Balustrade social club itself is symbolized in the image of a brothel providing its customers with the illusions of power; and in The Blacks we are back with the underdog interim out his hatred for his oppressor (which is also a form of love) in an endless ritual of mock-murder.

Jean Tardieu (built-in 1903) and Boris Vian (1920-59) are among the best of the French dramatists of the Cool. Tardieu is an experimenter who has systematically explored the possibilities of a theatre that tin can divorce itself from discursive voice communication to the point where language becomes mere musical sound. Vian, a devoted follower of Jarry, wrote a play, The Empire Builders, which shows homo fleeing from expiry and loneliness in the image of a family moving into ever smaller flats on college and higher floors of a mysterious building.

In Italy Dino Buzzati and Ezio d'Errico, in Federal republic of germany Günter Grass (known as a novelist for his monumental Tin Drum) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer are the main exponents of the Theatre of the Cool. In Britain, N. F. Simpson, James Saunders, David Campton, and Harold Pinter might be classed under this heading. N. F. Simpson has clear links with English language nonsense literature, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. James Saunders, particularly in Adjacent Time I'll Sing to You, expresses in dramatic form the thought of the existential philosophers. Pinter, who acknowledges Kafka and Beckett amidst his literary heroes, combines realism with an intuition of the absurdity of human beingness. In his later work he has shed some of the allegorical symbolism of his ancestry, but even in seemingly realistic plays like The Collection there is an absense of motivation and solution, a multple ambivalence and a sense of non-communication which transforms the seemingly realistic account of humdrum adultery into a poetic paradigm of the human condition.

Behind the Iron Curtain, where socialist realism is the official creed in the theatre, at that place would appear to be no room for an avant-garde trend of this type. Nevertheless there is one land where the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd has produced some astonishingly successful plays: Poland, an surface area of relative artistic freedom since the defeat of the Stalinists by Gomulka in the fall of 1956. A strong surrealist influence was present in Poland even before the state of war (Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz are two dramatists who might be regarded as among the about important immediate precursors of the Theatre of the Cool) so that the soil was fertile for a development which was further fostered by the power of drama of this kind to express political annotate in a suitably oblique class. A number of young dramatists, notably Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz Rozewicz, accept produced outstandingly original work in the convention of the Absurd.

Three of the playwrights represented in this volume are Parisian exiles. Eugène Ionesco is undoubtedly the most fertile and original of the dramatists of the Absurd, and also, in spite of a streak of clowning and fun for its own sake in his work, one of the well-nigh profound. He is moreover the most vocal of the dramatists of the Absurd, the only one who is prepared to discuss the theoretical foundations of his piece of work and to respond to the attacks on it from committed left-fly realists. The critique of language and the haunting presense of decease are Ionesco's chief themes in plays like The Bald Primadonna, The Lesson, The Chairs, The Killer, Rhinoceros, and Go out The King. Amédée or How to Go Rid of It (1953) is Ionesco's start full-length play and contains one of his nearly telling images. It is also feature in its alternation betwixt states of depression and euphoria, leaden oppression and floating on air, an image which reappears through his work and which culminates, in this particular play, in Amédée'southward floating away at the stop.

Arthur Adamov today belongs to the camp against which Ionesco directs his harshest polemics, the socialist realists whose organ is the periodical Théâtre populaire, but he started out equally a follower of Artaud, a self-confessed neurotic, an conflicting in a senseless world. Adamov's development from one extreme to the other is a fascinating artistic and psychological case history, in which Professor Taranne occupies a cardinal position. Adamov'south progress tin be seen as a process of psychological therapy through writing. Unable to confront the reality of the outside globe, he started out by projecting his oppressions and anxieties on to the phase. Zilch would accept induced him, he has since confessed, to mention whatsoever chemical element of the real world, such as a identify-proper name in one of his plays; he would have regarded that as a piece of unspeakable vulgarity. And however, when he committed to newspaper the dream which is now the play Professor Taranne, he realized that a real place-proper noun, that of Belgium, had occurred in the dream. Truthfulness in transcribing the dream thus forced him to compromise on one of his fundamental artistic principles. And from then onwards reality kept breaking through into his writing in ever more insistent form, until today he is a thorough-going realist of the Brechtian school. That is to say, by writing his obsessions out of his organisation, Adamov acquired the ability to face and to command the objective world from which he had withdrawn into neurosis. It might exist argued that the projection of neurotic obsessions is both more interesting and more illuminating in providing insights into the dark side of the human mind than the accurate transcription of historical events, and that therefore Adamov's absurdist plays are more fascinating, more successful than his later efforts. Only this is a thing of gustation as well as of ideological bias. The fact remains that Professor Taranne and the somewhat more realistic Ping Pong are undoubtedly amongst Adamov's all-time plays.

Fernando Arrabal (born 1932) is a Spaniard who has been living in French republic since 1954 and now writes in French. He is an admirer of Beckett, but sees his roots in the surrealist tradition of Spain, a land that has always been rich in fantasy and the grotesque (El Greco, Goya) and that in more recent times has produced such outstanding representatives of the mod movement every bit the painter Picasso (who has himself written ii plays in an absurdist vein) and the writers Lorca and Valle Inclàn. Arrabal's own contribution to the absurdist spectrum is a highly original i: his main preoccupation is with the absurdity of upstanding and moral rules. He looks at the globe with the incomprehemsion of a child that simply cannot understand the logic of conventional morality. Thus, in The Automobile Graveyard at that place is a prostitute who follows her profession only considering faith demands that one be kind to i'due south neighbours; how then could she pass up them the ultimate kindness of giving herself to them? And similarly in The 2 Executioners the rebel son who objects to the tortures that his mother inflicts on his father is faced with the dilemma of several contradictory moral laws: obediance to one's father, the human goodness that prompts ane to save the suffering victim from his torturers, and the need to honour and obey i'due south mother. These moral laws are here in obvious disharmonize, every bit it is the female parent who has the father tortured. Conspicuously the situation in which several moral laws are in contradiction exposes the absurdity of the system of values that accommodates them all. Arrabal refuses to judge; he just notes the position and shows that he finds it beyond his comprehension.

Edward Albee (built-in 1928) is one of the few American exponents of the Theatre of the Cool. An adopted child, he shares with Genet the orphan's sense of loneliness in an alien world; and the prototype of the dream kid which exists only in the adoptive parents' imagination recurs in a number of his plays, notably The American Dream and Who'due south Agape of Virginia Woolf. The latter, which has earned him an enormous success on Broadway, is undoubtedly one of the finest American plays since the heyday of Eugene O'Neill. Information technology is a roughshod trip the light fantastic of expiry reminiscent of Strindberg, outwardly realistic in grade, but in fact, as in the case of Pinter's best work, existing on at least two levels apart from the realistic one: as an allegory of American society, a poetic image of its emptiness and sterility, and as a complex ritual on the design of Genet. The Zoo Story (1958), ane of Albee's primeval dramatic ventures, has a like complication: it is a clinically accurate written report of Schizophrenia, an image of man's loneliness and disability to make contact, and besides, on the ritual and symbolic level, an act of ritual self-immolation that has curious parallels with Christ's atonement. (Notation the names Jerry - Jesus? - and Peter).

The plays in this book, like the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd in full general, present a disillusioned, harsh, and stark picture of the world. Though oft couched in the form of extravagant fantasies, they are still essentially realistic, in the sense that they never shirk the realities of the human listen with its despair, fearfulness and loneliness in an alien and hostile universe. At that place is more human reality in the grotesquely improvident images of Amédée than in many far longer plays plays in a convention that is a mere photographic copy of the surface of life. The realism of these plays is a psychological, and inner realism; they explaore the human sub-conscious in depth rather than trying to draw the outward appearance of human beingness. Nor is it quite right that these plays, deeply pessimistic equally they are, are nothing but an expression of utter despair. It is true that basically the Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to daze its audience out of complacency, to bring information technology face to face up with the harsh facts of the human state of affairs as these writers see it. But the claiming behind this bulletin is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human status as it is, in all its mystery and applesauce, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because at that place are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.

- Martin Esslin, Introduction to "Penguin Plays - Cool Drama" (Penguin, 1965)

"Martin Esslin was born Julius Pereszlenyi on 6 June 1918 into a Jewish family unit in Budapest, Hungary. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the Great War, he became Austrian by default and in 1920 the family moved to Vienna where he was educated at the Bundesgymnasium II. In 1936 he went to the Academy of Vienna where he studied Philosophy and English. He likewise studied directing, acting and dramaturgy at the Reinhardt Seminar of Dramatic Fine art. He was nearly to begin his theatrical career in Vienna when the Nazis invaded Austria. He fled, spending a twelvemonth in Brussels before reaching England where he became a scriptwriter and producer for the BBC'south European Services in 1940. He wrote numerous radio features on political, social and literary subjects and in 1955 was appointed assistant head of BBC European Productions, and in 1961, assistant head of Drama (Audio). In 1963 Esslin was appointed head of BBC Radio Drama. By the mid-1960s the Radio Drama department at the BBC was originating between 400 and 500 plays a year. In 1977 Esslin turned to teaching. He became Professor of Drama at Stanford University, California, for ii quarters annually, until 1988, and later that Professor Emeritus. He had too been visiting Professor of Theatre at Florida State University (1969-1976). He accomplished much recognition every bit the author of 2 of the well-nigh influential books dealing with the mail-war theatre, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (1959) and The Theatre of the Absurd (1962) — a term coined by Esslin. Esslin was awarded the OBE in 1972."

from austrian cutural forum

Martin Esslin links

Stanford Report - drama professor and theater critic (obit)
Guardian Unlimited - illuminating writer and radio drama producer (obit)
Stanford Magazine - he found meaning in absurdity (obit)
Voy Forums - Martin Esslin, drama critic, teacher, author (obit)
Joanne Karpinski (Regis Univ) - The Theatre of the Absurd (Martin Esslin excerpt)
Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia - theater of the absurd (Martin Esslin article)

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Source: https://kingalfreddrama.blogspot.com/2010/01/

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