Theatre of the Absurd

9 Key excerpts on "Theatre of the Absurd"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Theatre

  A Way of Seeing

  • Milly Barranger(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  ABSURDIST THEATRE In 1961, Martin Esslin wrote a seminal book called The Theatre of the Absurd about trends in theatre following the Second World War. He used the label to describe new theatrical ways of looking at existence devised by postwar European writers. Absurdist writers, such as Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, made their breakthrough in dramatic writing by presenting , without comment or moral judg-ment, situations showing life’s irrationality. The common factors in the absurdist plays of Ionesco, Beckett, and others are unrecognizable plots, mechanical char-acters, situations resembling dreams and nightmares, and incoherent dialogue. The absurdist writer does not tell a story or discuss social problems. Instead, the playwright presents in concrete stage images, such as two tramps waiting for a figure named Godot who never shows up, a sense of being in an absurd universe. ©Richard Perry/The New York Times/Redux CHAPTER FIVE THEATRICAL WRITING : PERSPECTIVES AND FORMS 125 Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. T HE A BSURD Absurdist playwrights begin with the premise that our world is absurd , meaning ir-rational, incongruous, and senseless. Albert Camus—a French philosopher, novelist, and playwright—diagnosed the human condition as absurd in a book of essays called The Myth of Sisyphus : A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd

  Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter

  • M. Bennett(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  These movies are not really about war, per se, but about how humans either cope, overcome, suc- cumb, etc., to the horrors of a situation like war, or the “absurd” contradic- tions present that juxtapose the desires of the combatants with the realities of war. Again, I am arguing that the Theatre of the Absurd is not about absurdity, but about making life meaningful given our absurd situation. Part I: Current Conceptions of the Absurd Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd I want to turn back, in order to move forward, to Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd because the Theatre of the Absurd came out of a particular his- torical moment and was codified into one “genre” through Esslin’s book. In the Preface to The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin clearly outlines the project of his book. He has three objectives for the book: 1) to define the convention of this “theatre” so that it can be judged on its own merits and not dismissed as nonsense or intellectual snobbery because it does not fit in with the stan- dards of “conventional” theatre, 2) to elucidate the meaning of these plays, and 3) to show how this theatre is an “expression—and one of the most representative ones—of the present situation of Western man.” 11 Esslin stresses that this is not a self-conscious movement. He is merely noting a trend from a group of individual playwrights who, he argues, felt “cut off and isolated in [their] private world[s].” 12 Esslin lays out his project by starting with the theatre as an expression of the philosophy of the absurd Introduction ● 5 (objective #3). From there, he explains the dramatic convention (objective #1). These two goals make up the Introduction. The rest of the book is the elucidation of the plays, based on the philosophy and convention of the absurd in the Introduction (objective #2). In this section, I explain Esslin’s claims about the philosophy and the convention.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe

  Imagination and Resistance

  • M. Morgan(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The Theater of the Absurd neatly sums up this sensibility and the new form of theatre to which it gave rise. As Esslin points out, this genre of theatre was less the result of a conscious movement than the manifestation of a convergence of strikingly similar styles. The playwrights in question—Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, and Genet—did not consider themselves part of a common enterprise, and each indeed privileged his individualism and his uniquely personal view of the world and the theatre. This experimentation was centered in Paris, whose cultural life—particularly its hospitality to émigré artists such as Adamov, Beckett, and Ionesco—allowed extensive creative freedom. Despite the individual experiences of isolation and marginality that these writers shared, the plays of these “absurdists” bore striking resemblances to each other. And if they gave voice to a sense of the contingency of things powerfully articulated by the existentialists, they also sounded this theme in a way dramatically different from existentialism with its humanistic hopefulness.

  At the root of their commonality lay their concern with the absurd, a concept previously identified by Albert Camus and discussed by the existentialist philosophers. For Camus, “[the] divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feelings of Absurdity.”7 The situation of the exile, caught between his homeland, to which he cannot return, and the promise of a new home, which is not to be found, is absurd. And for the absurdists this experience—which many of them, especially Ionesco, Adamov, and Beckett, experienced firsthand—was the essential and inalterable human experience. As Ionesco wrote, echoing Camus, “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose . . . Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.”8

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

  • Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, John Peck(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Theatre is the most social of art forms and, as such, requires a great many conventions so that the theatrical event, on and off the stage, can take place in an orderly fashion. We know from history that festivals in Ancient Greece were highly organized. It was also in Ancient Greece that the theoretical foundations of our western theatre were laid and, twenty-five centuries on, the name of Aristotle is still invoked, rightly or wrongly, in discussions concerning the structure of drama. Although the Anglo-Saxon world escaped the worst excesses of neo-classical formalism, mainly thanks to the influence of Shakespeare, the rules that came to govern French seventeenth-century theatre (unities of time, place and action; unity of tone; verisimilitude and decorum) aimed at creating an orderly, coherent, harmonious, rational dramatic poem. These same rules came to embody the ideal of playwriting throughout the western world after neo-classicism established itself as the dominant aesthetic norm in the seventeenth century. A good play was a play with a strong, straightforward plot moving relentlessly to its logical, tragic or comic, conclusion, with clearly drawn and highly individualized characters, with well-written, rhetorical dialogue, to be clearly and evocatively spoken by actors who convincingly portrayed their roles in a familiar setting or in some easily identifiable exotic location. Such were the ideals upheld by all dramatists hoping to have their plays performed in the theatre, from Aeschylus to Ibsen. At the risk of further oversimplification, it can be said that, before the twentieth century, the dramatic form was eminently logical and rational (even when dealing with extraordinary events) and that it aimed at providing spectators with an authentic picture of their world. When our forebears recognized that the world was in a state of chaos—and they often did—their artists aimed at constructing meaning out of that same chaos, at creating order out of disorder, at giving shape to what is shapeless. The –New Theatre’ of the 1950s, soon to be known as –the Theatre of the Absurd’, overturned twenty-five centuries of tradition by rejecting all rules and by facing the chaos head-on.

  ‘The feeling of the absurd can strike anyone round the corner of any street’, wrote Albert Camus in

  The Myth of Sisyphus ([1942] 1975

  , p. 17), thereby putting the term –absurd’ at the centre of philosophical debate and at the forefront of artistic reflection for years to come. For Camus –the feeling of the absurdity of the world’ springs from the confrontation between man’s conscience, his consciousness, his thirst for rationality and the inert, irrational, unknowable world. Yet, contrary to received ideas, the realization of such an irredeemable divorce does not lead to passive despair or intellectual suicide. Convinced of the ultimate absurdity of life, man will strive towards a moral and ethical imperative for greater lucidity and for living life to the full, since life is, after all, the only human tangible reality.

  Camus’s most despairing play, Cross Purpose (Le Malentendu, 1944), tells of the murder of a young man by his long-lost mother and sister who fail to recognize him in the lone traveller come to spend the night in their inn. Constructed like a mathematical equation, Cross Purpose, has a simple, realistic set, a small cast of well-defined characters, a relentless action that lasts just a few hours, and contains not the slightest incident that could distract the spectator’s attention from the subject under scrutiny. Well played, this becomes a metaphysical tragedy of the highest order, stating that –this world we live in doesn’t make any sense’. The same clarity of meaning is also the hallmark of Camus’ other plays, and of the dramatic output of his fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre whose In Camera (Huis clos

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  English Literature

  A Student Guide

  • Martin Stephen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1937) is also often linked with this group. These dramatists shared a belief that human life was essentially irrational, purposeless, and out of harmony with its surroundings, the result of this being a chronic state of uncertainty, anguish (angst), and depression. Other authors had reached this conclusion before; none had allowed it to dictate the form of their work as well as its content. Absurdist plays can drop all logic and rationality, and allow absurd, illogical, or irrational things to happen on stage in order to illustrate the central thesis that this is the nature of life. The opening shot in this revolution was fired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), which shocked theatre audiences at first by its absence of plot or structure, its bare set, and its central concept that ‘nothing happens’. Absurd drama could be seen as a blend of surrealism and farce. An excellent example is Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1960), in which people keep turning into rhinoceroses, whilst others frantically try to ignore the fact. In the novel, works such as The Trial (1925) and Metamorphosis (1912) by Franz Kafka (1883–1924) have absurdist elements in them. AESTHETICISM and DECADENCE: the Aesthetic Movement originated in France in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and in English literature its best-known adherents are Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. The Aesthetes believed in ‘art for art’s sake’, and the pursuit of beauty to the exclusion of all else, particularly materialistic or worldly values. The Aesthetic Movement was closely linked with the Decadent Movement, with its search for exquisite sensations, its hatred of all that was ‘natural’ and its obsession with high artifice. Aesthetes and Decadents were associated with the flouting of conventional morality. AFFECTIVE FALLACY: the attempt to evaluate a poem by its emotional effect upon the reader

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance

  An Introduction

  • Claire Warden(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Theatre of the Absurd, he suggests, remains part of this tradition, differing most significantly in its reception: in Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter, ‘for the first time this approach has met with a wide response from a broadly based public’ (Esslin 1968: 388). The plays that Esslin presents under this banner all exhibit certain characteristics: a reliance on poetic imagery rather than accurate, objective pictures of reality, a preoccupation with ques-tions rather than solutions, and a purposeful facing up to a world of uncertainty where the established systems of reason have collapsed. For Esslin, these plays represent the ‘psychological reality expressed in images that are the outward projection of states of mind, fears, dreams, nightmares and conflicts within the personality of the author’ (Esslin 1968: 405). Such a focus on the author when the Author (that is, any sense of God) has been purposefully rejected by the playwrights does seem rather odd and incongruous. Yet Esslin’s analysis does point us towards one factor central to this current volume: the plays of Ionesco, Beckett and others can certainly be understood as a continuation of modernist ideas in the post-war epoch. movements in performance: expressionist screaming While language combusted into sounds and rhythms, in expressionism it erupted in cries of agony. Der Schrei (‘the scream’), visually presented in Munch’s painting, proved a recurring moment in expressionist drama as a declaration of personal pain, isolation and torment. Whereas futurism looked performing modernisms 61 with hopeful expectation to a machine-filled, war-driven destiny, and dada and surrealism maintained a sense of humour, expressionism seemed rather bleak. At its centre appeared an isolated figure, routinely (though not univer-sally) a man. While he often existed in a community or society, he stood apart from them, ostracised by his peers or detached through his own choice.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The absurd in literature

  • Neil Cornwell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Bus Driver , 91–130). Another further reach of weirdness is attained in Ronshin’s miniature ‘How I Became a Fly’ (67–70), in which the narrator, a shopkeeper, is dismembered and metamorphosed at the hands of a ‘strange customer’.

  Beyond the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’?

  a world of chaos need not be dreaded … (William W. Demastes, Theatre of Chaos)

  A bizarre hybrid specimen of fiction, which would seem to require at least a brief comment here, were it only on the grounds of its title,15 is Karen Cobb’s gay novel Theatre of the Absurd (1995), set in San Francisco’s theatre world, in which the framing prose fictional plot surrounds, interacts with, influences and is influenced by, the play within this plot – a stylised harlequinade called ‘The Struggle for Creation’. ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ is here used by Cobb as both a metaphorical and a literal device to project the personal obsessions of a bisexual playwright and other self-fixated theatricals, reduced sharply towards, and destructively beyond, the absurd and its theatre. Something of a reverse of this structural model is to be found in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003), in which a number of stories are embedded (and narrated or read) in an extremely black comic play, to which we shall return shortly.

  Women’s absurd?

  There seem to have been few women absurdist writers – a question addressed by Toby Silverman Zinman (in Brater and Cohn, 203–20); one, however (in Zinman’s view) is the Cuban-born playwright Maria Irene Fornes. While, to an extent at least, employing absurdist linguistic techniques, women writers are seen as avoiding, or rejecting, the pessimistic and abstract philosophies entailed in absurdism (a strident exception to this, however, to be considered later, is Sarah Kane). Caryl Churchill, who combines the (postmodernist) transhistorical gathering with contemporary social satire (in Top Girls

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Kantian Antitheodicy

  Philosophical and Literary Varieties

  • Sami Pihlström, Sari Kivistö(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Human beings can send prayers to God and hope to meet him face to face, thereby trying to make their situation more comfortable, although knowing that it is hopeless. All facts are arbitrary, and the absurd demonstrates that there is no rational world or lucid reasoning that would explain the facts and personal experiences, since the facts could always be different. 114 Thus, general patterns are always illusory. Moreover, if all that happens is inevitable, then it frees men from guilt and this is ethically problematic. In this sense absurd literature presents perhaps a truly authentic religious attitude to existence, as it accepts the irrationality of the human condition and does not offer any existential categories to make things understandable. Absurd literature emphatically rejects all explanatory strategies, while admitting that the desire for explanation and compensation is deeply embedded in the human mind. Waiting for Godot exhibits this human wish and expectation that something would turn up to alleviate suffering. This wish of finding balance in the future is beautifully (but ironically) expressed, for example, in the following passage in which the cries for help continue, even when the next day eventually comes: POZZO: Help! ESTRAGON: Do you hear him? VLADIMIR: We are no longer alone, waiting for the night, waiting for Godot, waiting for … waiting. All evening we have struggled, unassisted. Now it’s over

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Death of Comedy

  • Erich Segal(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  the death of comedy beckett: the death of comedy 21 Beckett: The Death of Comedy I n the end the head conquers and the heart dies. It is no accident that the artists of the Theater of the Absurd were all intellectuals. Jarry was a serious art and literary critic. Apollinaire was not only an art critic, but a painter in his own right. Cocteau was versed in mythology and every imaginable artistic discipline. Ionesco had a degree in French from the University of Bucharest, and published many serious articles on theater. In every case these authors were acutely aware of the forms they were systematically destroying. And it was as much an act of intellect as mis-chief. We see a gradual decline in human faculties, from infantilism in Jarry, to infancy in Apollinaire, and ªnally to infantia (the total inability to communicate) in Ionesco. The root of all these words is the Latin for, fari (“to speak”). We can also express it with the Greek aut-(“self ”), whereby the decline is from the autonomy of the classical hero, to au-tomatons like Ubu, to the autism of Samuel Beckett, the subject of this ªnal chapter. In the progress of the anti-classical movement we witness the in-creasing dehumanization of the word in modern culture. The entire Theater of the Absurd is in a sense a long gloss on Theodor Adorno’s famous remark that “it is barbarous to write a poem after Auschwitz.” Kafka wrote ominously, “now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence.” 1 It is ªtting then that one of the most popular artists of the early twentieth century was a silent ªlm comedian—Cocteau’s idol, le profond Chaplin. The avowed aim of a conventional hero is to win, as Balzac epit-omized it, une femme et une fortune. But the little tramp’s quest is usually far more modest: merely to keep on his feet. Take for example the ball-room scene in The Gold Rush (1925), where Chaplin keeps slipping on the dance ºoor as if it were an ice rink, unable to stand up.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book