Theatre of the absurd
The theatre of the absurd (French: théâtre de l'absurde [teɑtʁ(ə) də lapsyʁd]) is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence.[1]
Origin[edit]
In the first edition of The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin quotes the French philosopher Albert Camus's essay "Myth of Sisyphus", as it uses the word "absurdity" to describe the human situation: "In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. … This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity."[6][7]
Esslin presents the four defining playwrights of the movement as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet, and in subsequent editions he added a fifth playwright, Harold Pinter.[8][9] Other writers associated with this group by Esslin and other critics include Tom Stoppard,[10] Friedrich Dürrenmatt,[11] Fernando Arrabal,[12] Edward Albee,[13] Boris Vian,[14] and Jean Tardieu.[8][9][12]
Precursors[edit]
Elizabethan – tragicomedy[edit]
The mode of most "absurdist" plays is tragicomedy.[15][16] As Nell says in Endgame, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness … it's the most comical thing in the world".[17] Esslin cites William Shakespeare as an influence on this aspect of the "absurd drama".[18] Shakespeare's influence is acknowledged directly in the titles of Ionesco's Macbett and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Friedrich Dürrenmatt says in his essay "Problems of the Theatre", "Comedy alone is suitable for us … But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already really comedies out of which the tragic arises."[19]
Though layered with a significant amount of tragedy, theatre of the absurd echoes other great forms of comedic performance, according to Esslin, from Commedia dell'arte to vaudeville.[15][20] Similarly, Esslin cites early film comedians and music hall artists such as Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops and Buster Keaton as direct influences. (Keaton even starred in Beckett's Film in 1965.)[21]
Formal experimentation[edit]
As an experimental form of theatre, many theatre of the absurd playwrights employ techniques borrowed from earlier innovators. Writers and techniques frequently mentioned in relation to the theatre of the absurd include the 19th-century nonsense poets, such as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear;[22] Polish playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz;[23] the Russians Daniil Kharms,[24] Nikolai Erdman,[25] and others; Bertolt Brecht's distancing techniques in his "epic theatre";[26] and the "dream plays" of August Strindberg.[8][27]
One commonly cited precursor is Luigi Pirandello, especially Six Characters in Search of an Author.[27][28] Pirandello was a highly regarded theatrical experimentalist who wanted to bring down the fourth wall presupposed by the realism of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen. According to W. B. Worthen, Six Characters and other Pirandello plays use "metatheatre—roleplaying, plays-within-plays, and a flexible sense of the limits of stage and illusion—to examine a highly-theatricalized vision of identity".[29]
Another influential playwright was Guillaume Apollinaire whose The Breasts of Tiresias was the first work to be called "surreal".[30][31][32]
Pataphysics, surrealism, and Dadaism[edit]
A precursor is Alfred Jarry whose Ubu plays scandalized Paris in the 1890s. Likewise, the concept of 'pataphysics—"the science of imaginary solutions"—first presented in Jarry's Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician)[33] was inspirational to many later absurdists,[31] some of whom joined the Collège de 'pataphysique, founded in honor of Jarry in 1948[30][34] (Ionesco,[35] Arrabal, and Vian[35][36] were given the title "transcendent satrape of the Collège de 'pataphysique"). The Theatre Alfred Jarry, founded by Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac, housed several absurdist plays, including ones by Ionesco and Adamov.[37][38]
In the 1860s, a gaucho author established himself as a precursor of the theater of the absurd in Brazilian lands. Qorpo-Santo, pseudonym of José Joaquim de Campos Leão, released during the last years of his life several theatrical works that can be classified as precursors of the theater of the absurd. However, he is little known, even in his homeland, but works such as "Mateus e Mateusa" are gradually being rediscovered by scholars in Brazil and around the world.[39]
Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" (presented in Theatre and its Double) was a particularly important philosophical treatise. Artaud claimed theatre's reliance on literature was inadequate and that the true power of theatre was in its visceral impact.[40][41][42] Artaud was a surrealist, and many other members of the surrealist group were significant influences on the absurdists.[43][44][45]
Absurdism is also frequently compared to surrealism's predecessor, Dadaism (for example, the Dadaist plays by Tristan Tzara performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich).[46] Many of the absurdists had direct connections with the Dadaists and surrealists. Ionesco,[47][48] Adamov,[49][50] and Arrabal[51] for example, were friends with surrealists still living in Paris at the time including Paul Eluard and André Breton, the founder of surrealism, and Beckett translated many surrealist poems by Breton and others from French into English.[52][53]
Relationship with existentialism[edit]
Many of the absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical spokesman for existentialism in Paris, but few absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own existentialist philosophy, as expressed in Being and Nothingness, and many of the absurdists had a complicated relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet's plays, stating that for Genet, "Good is only an illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good".[54]
Ionesco, however, hated Sartre bitterly.[55] Ionesco accused Sartre of supporting communism but ignoring the atrocities committed by communists; he wrote Rhinoceros as a criticism of blind conformity, whether it be to Nazism or communism; at the end of the play, one man remains on Earth resisting transformation into a rhinoceros.[56][57] Sartre criticized Rhinoceros by questioning: "Why is there one man who resists? At least we could learn why, but no, we learn not even that. He resists because he is there."[58][59] Sartre's criticism highlights a primary difference between the theatre of the absurd and existentialism: the theatre of the absurd shows the failure of man without recommending a solution.[60] In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy, comparing the absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, "It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and yourself started out less from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought out these themes, you expressed them in a far more vital contemporary fashion." Ionesco replied, "I have the feeling that these writers – who are serious and important – were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language. With them it was still rhetoric, eloquence. With Adamov and Beckett it really is a very naked reality that is conveyed through the apparent dislocation of language."[61]
In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Beckett's primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity" - or the repetition of life even though the end result will be the same no matter what and everything is essentially pointless - as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame, Beckett's work focuses, "on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er' ."[62] Beckett's own relationship with Sartre was complicated by a mistake made in the publication of one of his stories in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes.[63] Beckett said, though he liked Nausea, he generally found the writing style of Sartre and Heidegger to be "too philosophical" and he considered himself "not a philosopher".[64]