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Theatre of the Absurd

Introduction
Theatre of the Absurd is a label that was created in the early 1960s to help explain a
phenomenon of primarily French-language experimental theatre of the previous
decade but applied more broadly to other European and American theatre and
subsequently used as a utility generic term. Absurd plays express shock and
disillusionment at the loss of a set of stable ideas or systems of belief that underpinned
the old conventions, such as the ‘well-made play’, which the absurdists set out to
dismantle. Scholar and critic, Martin Esslin, opined of the movement: ‘The 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 of the absurdity of
existence.’

History
Theatre of the Absurd is a label that was created in the early 1960s to help explain a
phenomenon of primarily French-language experimental theatre of the previous
decade but applied more broadly to other European and American theatre and
subsequently used as a utility generic term.
Hungarian-born theatre critic and scholar Martin Esslin, who settled in England after
fleeing the Nazis, coined the term in his 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd,
identifying the core playwrights as Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and
Eugène Ionesco. Like Esslin, they were all exiles and outsiders in one way or another:
Adamov, who came to Paris in the 1920s, was born to rich Armenians living in the
Russian North Caucasus who lost their wealth in the 1917 Revolution; Beckett, who lived
in Paris from the late 1930s on, was born in a Dublin suburb, and wrote in English and
French; Genet was raised by a foster family and became a vagrant thief and prostitute;
Ionesco was born in Romania, raised in France, returned to Romania as a teenager after
his parents divorced, and settled in France in the 1940s.
The immediate precursors of the tranche of playwrights dubbed absurd can be found in
the avant-garde theatre of Paris that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, from
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu plays and surrealist theatre, especially Guillaume Apollinaire’s
dream-like drama, to the Theatre of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud. Dada and Strindberg’s
expressionist nightmares (such as Ghost Sonata, Dream Play and To Damsacus) were
acknowledged influences, along with the tradition of popular clowning, whether in
music hall or on the cinema screen in the subversive adventures of Charlie Chaplin and
Buster Keaton.
Though plays later called absurd appeared shortly after World War 2, such as Genet’s
Les Bonnes (The Maids) in 1947 and Adamov’s La Parodie and L’Invasion in 1950, it was
not until the mid-to-late 1950s that the phenomenon began to take shape. A slew of
productions created an international swell that led to the adoption of the term, and at
its centre were the plays of Ionesco and Beckett. Ionesco’s first play, La Cantatrice
Chauve (The Bald Prima Donna), opened in Paris in 1950 billed as an ‘anti-play’. It
shows two petit-bourgeois couples engaged in bored, vacuous conversation and while
it features a clock that always tells the opposite of the correct time there is no prima
donna, bald or otherwise (the nonsense title came from a verbal mistake one of the
actors made in rehearsal). At the end, a sequence of non-sequiturs leads to a blackout
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and when the lights are brought up again the play has restarted, with the opening lines
being spoken by the other couple; the people have lost their individuality and have
become inter-changeable. The play’s 1957 revival in Paris with Ionesco’s La Leçon (The
Lesson) at the Théâtre de la Huchette, where they have played ever since, was a key
moment in the formation of the Theatre of the Absurd.
When London’s Royal Court in 1958 paired The Lesson, which demonstrates the power
of those who choose the meaning of language, with Ionesco’s The Chairs, in which two
old people confront the nothingness of the world, the celebrated Observer critic
Kenneth Tynan launched a vivid assault on this anti-realist theatre, which he claimed
was, by implication, anti-reality as well. A dialogue in the newspaper between the
protagonists, with Ionesco cast on the side of anti-theatre, brought increased attention
not only to his plays but also to the kind of theatre for which he stood. Ionesco, like
Brecht, believed theatre should achieve an alienation effect but he did not think Brecht
went far enough, that he unacceptably mixed the true and the false, whereas Ionesco
wanted to abandon the pretence of simulating reality altogether.
Tynan’s attack came after London had also seen two plays by Beckett, which enjoyed
the greatest leverage of the absurdist plays in the public imagination. En Attendant
Godot (Waiting for Godot), first published in 1952, was premiered in Paris the following
year at the Théâtre de Babylone and ran for 400 performances. Beckett’s depiction of
two characters waiting in vain for someone called Godot to arrive came to London in
1955 and, despite Beckett’s disapproval of the production and much critical
incomprehension, it transferred from the small Arts Theatre to the West End. The
Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida saw the play make its debut in the US in
1956, and later that year it briefly appeared on Broadway. When Esslin wrote his book,
Beckett’s play had been translated into more than twenty languages and performed
across the globe. Fin de Partie (Endgame), Beckett’s next stage play, was given its
premiere at the Royal Court in 1957 and offers in contrast to the menacing exterior of
Waiting for Godot an oppressive bare interior inhabited by a blind old man unable to
stand, his servant, who is unable to sit, and the old man’s legless parents, who live in
two ashbins.
By the time Endgame appeared, Adamov, another of the absurdist quartet, had turned
his back on the absurd. Plays such as Le Professeur Taranne, written in 1951 and based
on a dream, and Le Ping-Pong (Ping Pong, 1955), which shows through the story of two
men’s lives the pointlessness of human effort to give meaning to existence and which
Esslin considers one of the masterpieces of the absurd, had given way to epic drama
clearly rooted in historical events. Some thought Genet was moving in a similar
direction when he followed Les Bonnes and Le Balcon (The Balcony, 1956) with Les
Nègres (The Blacks, 1959) and Les Paravents (The Screens, 1961). Esslin, who notes the
evident political nature of the latter (dealing, as it does, with the Algerian War of
Independence), believes Genet’s earlier plays, in their rejection of conventional
character and motivation, belong firmly in the absurd camp. Probably timing rather than
intent placed Genet among the absurdists, with his immensely expansive theatricality
and unsentimental view of power, offering, as Esslin puts it, an image of humanity
trapped in a maze of mirrors.
Esslin expanded the scope of his study to include a disparate group of playwrights,
both French and beyond, such as Edward Albee, Fernando Arrabal, Max Frisch, Robert
Pinget, Harold Pinter, N.F. Simpson, Jean Tardieu, and Boris Vian. Esslin subsequently
widened the circle further and added more disciples, such as Jack Gelber, Vaclav
Havel, Arthur Kopit, Slawomir Mrozek, and Tadeusz Rozewicz, thereby demonstrating
the elasticity of the term and its consequent limitations.

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Theory
The absurd playwrights were defined less by their philosophy than by their rejection of
the dominant forms of theatrical storytelling, which centred on the conventional
naturalistic or realistic mode anchored still in adherence to certain rules of theatre
believed to have been propounded by Aristotle: realistic mise-en-scène, with realistic
people in realistic situations. Of especial interest was the deconstruction of language,
of breaking the links between word and meaning, between object and word. Words
became objects themselves alongside other objects on stage, which often took on a
threatening and uncontrollable aspect. In this critique or rejection of rationality, and
even the attempt at rationality, the potency of the stage picture became more powerful
than any reductive analysis of it could be. As Esslin wrote: ‘The 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 of the absurdity of existence.’
Absurd plays express shock and disillusionment at the loss of a set of stable ideas or
systems of belief that underpinned the old conventions, such as the ‘well-made play’,
which the absurdists set out to dismantle. However, Esslin also argues not only that
absurdism might coincide with the height of realism but may also be more realistic than
conventional drama. Esslin argues that Pinter, noted for his ‘ear’ and the apparent
accuracy of conversational speech, demonstrates that realistic speech is illogical. If the
real conversation of real people is absurd, then, by extension, Esslin says, it is the well-
made play with its surface polish and neat resolutions that is unrealistic and not absurd
drama.
Many of the concerns of the absurdists were to be found in other disciplines, for
instance in the linguistic explorations of Heidegger, Sartre and Saussure, and the
deconstruction theories of Derrida and post-modernism. The term ‘Theatre of the
Absurd’, however, derived from the philosophical writings of the Algerian-born French
author Albert Camus, who, it was claimed, believed that at root the human condition
was absurd. A key Camus text is The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the figure from Greek
mythology who was condemned to repeat endlessly the absurd task of pushing a
boulder up a mountain only for it to fall back down under its own weight. Absurd
originally meant out of harmony before it came to bear its contemporary meaning of
ridiculous, and, indeed, a characteristic shared by the absurdists is a sense of humour.
In the wake of the horrors of the World War 2, and in particular the failure of totalitarian
models of explaining the world as exemplified by fascism and communism, not only did
life seem absurd but also any attempt to give it coherent meaning.
The intellectual provenance of the term is, nevertheless, contested. It comes in the
wake of Freudianism and is allied to existentialism, yet Camus, though classified as an
existentialist, claimed he was no such thing. Similarly, the writers to whom the term
absurdist was applied denied being absurdists; they were certainly not part of a
conscious movement, and, indeed, the notion most commonly espoused by them,
whatever their differences, was that they did not belong to any movement at all.
The differences between the writers to whom the term was applied – differences which
grew as the label became more widely attached - led to more confusion about what it
meant. Camus had written that the response to absurdity should be revolt not
resignation yet most commentators found more of the latter than the former in the plays
that were huddled within the absurd tent. Eventually the term became so flexible as to
be almost meaningless beyond the simple idea that reality lies beyond rational
exegesis.

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Practice
The debates surrounding the nature and meaning of theatre in the late 1950s and ‘60s
showed how far the art form lagged behind others in its critical apparatus. Picasso was
no longer decried because he did not use perspective, yet Beckett, Ionesco and the
other absurdists were criticised for not using a proper plot. Theatre had to catch up in
order to appreciate the plays gathered together as absurdist, and Esslin provided a
means to do so. Ironically, he did this by defining new conventions for the rule breakers,
conventions that allowed him to identify absurdism with forensic detail to the extent
that some plays by, for instance, Adamov and Genet were described as absurdist while
others were not, and so were even just parts of a play (he cites the symbolic guignol
interludes in Adamov’s Spring ’71).
To illustrate the underlying absurd convention, Esslin uses as an example Ionesco’s
Amédée, in which a middle-aged couple share their flat with a corpse (possibly of the
woman’s lover killed by the husband, or perhaps of a burglar). During the course of the
play, the corpse grows bigger and bigger until its huge foot smashes through from the
bedroom into the living room, threatening to expel the couple from their home. The man
tries to get rid of the corpse, dragging it through the streets towards the river, but it
becomes like a balloon and the man floats away. Esslin says Ionesco has put a dream
on stage, and dreams do not follow the rules of realistic theatre. Neither do they
communicate ideas, like political theatre does, but instead, poetic images, and images
by their very nature are ambiguous and open to interpretation.
The term proved invaluable in critical practice. Audiences and critics had been largely
bemused by the work of the absurdist playwrights, who ignored or overturned the
accepted rules and conventions of theatre, and a term that helped place these
incitements was welcome, even if disputed. Other terms, such as ‘the theatre of the
unexpected’, were also used but the persuasive power of Esslin’s book, which went into
several editions, won the day and the absurd label stuck. Esslin had, indeed, created
the movement about which he was writing and laid the grounds for it to enter common
theatrical parlance.
In the critical excitement of the 1960s, the term found its history pushed outwards and
backwards, and connections between, for example, King Lear and Endgame made by
the Polish critic Jan Kott in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which appeared in English
in 1964, were filtered through the absurdist prism along with related phenomena such
as Theatre of Cruelty. As the crew of rebels recruited to the cause became more
incongruous – including even playwrights as different as Brecht and Pirandello, for
example – the concept gradually fell out of use through over use. It remained,
nevertheless, an important critical tool; at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, the term was still being used, for instance in relation to the plays of Martin
McDonagh, and in 2015 a collection of essays (Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd
edited by Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh) tried to revitalise the absurdist body of work
by arguing it was an emergent form of ecological theatre.

Further Reading
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London, Bloomsbury, reissue edition, 2014):
expanded from the original text that coined and defined the term and gave rise to its
wide acceptance within the international theatrical world. Chapters on the key
playwrights, Adamov, Beckett, Genet and Ionesco, and essays on the wider circle of
absurdist playwrights.

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J.L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1983); two chapters on the Theatre of the Absurd provide useful
introductions to and an overview of the idea, particularly in relation to Beckett, Pinter
and Ionesco.
Michael Y Bennett, The Cambridge Introduction to the Theatre and Literature of the
Absurd (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015): puts the term and the
playwrights associated with it in their historical, intellectual and cultural contexts,
tracing the development of the phenomenon and exploring its contemporary influence.