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Absurd Theatre

The theater of the absurd emerged in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s through plays by writers like Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. It drew from absurdist philosophies, medieval morality plays, surrealist art, and the works of writers like Kafka who portrayed the irrational and dreamlike. Plays in this style aimed to convey a sense of bewilderment at the inexplicable universe through poetic, fantasy-like images rather than realistic portrayals, as seen in Beckett's Happy Days and Ionesco's Rhinoceros. The absurdist theater movement influenced playwrights internationally in the following decades.

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199 views1 page

Absurd Theatre

The theater of the absurd emerged in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s through plays by writers like Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. It drew from absurdist philosophies, medieval morality plays, surrealist art, and the works of writers like Kafka who portrayed the irrational and dreamlike. Plays in this style aimed to convey a sense of bewilderment at the inexplicable universe through poetic, fantasy-like images rather than realistic portrayals, as seen in Beckett's Happy Days and Ionesco's Rhinoceros. The absurdist theater movement influenced playwrights internationally in the following decades.

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Neha Sharma
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From the 1995 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

theater of the absurd The theater of the absurd refers to tendencies in dramatic literature that emerged in Paris during the late 1940s and early '50s in the plays of Arthur ADAMOV, Fernando ARRABAL, Samuel BECKETT, Jean GENET, Eugene IONESCO, and Jean TARDIEU. Its roots can be found in the allegorical morality plays of the Middle Ages and the autos sacramentales (allegorical religious dramas) of baroque Spain; the nonsense literature of writers like Lewis Carroll; the dream plays of Strindberg and the dream novels of James Joyce and Franz Kafka; the grotesque drama of Alfred JARRY; and the frantic farces of Georges FEYDEAU. Its direct forerunners were the DADA movement and the SURREALISM of the 1920s and '30s. One of its most potent theoretical sources was The Theater and Its Double (1938; Eng. trans., 1958) by Antonin ARTAUD. The term theater 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. The playwrights loosely grouped under the label of the absurd endeavor to convey their sense of bewilderment, anxiety, and wonder in the face of an inexplicable universe. They rely heavily on poetic metaphor as a means of projecting outward their innermost states of mind. Hence, the images of the theater of the absurd tend to assume the quality of fantasy, dream, and nightmare; they do not so much portray the outward appearance of reality as the playwright's emotional perception of an inner reality. Thus Beckett's Happy Days (1961) expresses a generalized human anxiety about the approach of death through the concrete image of a woman sunk waist-deep in the ground in the first act and neck-deep in the second; and Ionesco's Rhinoceros (1960; Eng. trans., 1960) demonstrates the playwright's anxiety about the spread of inhuman totalitarian tendencies in society by showing the population of a city turning into savage pachyderms. Writers outside France who in the 1950s and '60s showed the influence of the theater 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 Vaclav HAVEL in Czechoslovakia. Martin Esslin Bibliography: Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 2d ed. (1968; repr. 1973); Gassner, John, Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama (1965); Gilman, Richard, The Making of Modern Drama (1974; repr. 1987); Grossvogel, David I., Four Playwrights and a Postscript: Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet (1962; repr. 1976). Copyright 1995 by Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.

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