Theatre of the Absurd

Theatre of the Absurd, generic term first employed by the critic Martin Esslin in the 1960s to classify certain dramatists writing in the 1950s, principally in French, who are seen to be reacting against traditional Western theatrical concepts. As an alternative to “anti-théâtre” or “nouveau théâtre” (similar formalist concerns can be identified in the French exponents of the nouveau roman), it has now come to designate above all the theatre of Beckett, Ionesco, Arrabal, the early plays of Adamov, and Genet. Many of its concerns find a counterpart in the theoretical writings of Artaud in Le Théâtre et Son Double (1938) and, to some extent, in Brecht’s notion of the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), while much of the slapstick has roots in the films of Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton. Taking as its starting point the apparent absurdity of life, visualized here and not simply evoked as in the theatre of Giraudoux, Anouilh, Sartre, and Camus, the Theatre of the Absurd is not a movement or school, and all the writers included in the term are in fact extremely heterogeneous. What they do have in common, however, besides being either of foreign extraction or outsiders to French bourgeois society, is a general rejection of Western theatre in its adherence to psychological characterization, coherent structure and plot, and a reliance on dialogic communication. Through processes of defamiliarization and depersonalization, these playwrights, ferociously anti-Cartesian, undo the structures of consciousness, logic, and language. The cultural accretion that the world makes sense (a world that not insignificantly had recently experienced the concentration camps and Hiroshima) is subverted and replaced by a world in which words and actions can be entirely contradictory. Yet what is at play is not so much non-sense but a perpetual deferral of sense, the plays creating their own inner logic, remorseless patterns, at turns sad (Beckett’s En Attendant Godot), pathetic (Beckett’s Fin de Partie), grotesque (Ionesco’s La Leçon), comic (Ionesco’s La Cantatrice Chauve), macabre (Arrabal’s Les Deux Bourreaux), humiliating (Adamov’s Professeur Taranne), or violent (Genet’s Le Balcon). The problematization of referents, aligned on and off the stage, affects three major areas: character (which can change gender, personality, and status), plot (which is often circular, goes nowhere, and refuses any aesthetic resolution), and objects (which can proliferate to the point of pushing out the characters, as in Ionesco, or are reduced to a bare minimum, as in Beckett, in order to highlight the discernible themes of the void and nothingness). The influence of these playwrights was not confined to France and can still be felt in much modern experimental theatre.