The theatre of the absurd

THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

Soon after the 2 world war Paris became the meeting point of playwrights of different nationalities. The most famous ones are Beckett, Ionesco (Rumanian) and Adamov (Russian). The plays were written in the decade between 1952 and 1962 and they were labelled as the theatre of the absurd. Authors don't form a movement or a school, but they shared the same ideas and attitudes on life. As they all got to the same convictions to the same time, it proved that they had the same artistic and cultural background:

The 2 world war

The atomic bomb

The Nazi concentration camps

The cold war ( it created a climate of tension that seemed to leave no place for hope)

Other characteristics were:

• The decline of the religious faith that started from primitivism
• Incapacity of reason to create an all-comprehensive system that could explain the world. The society came to an empty consumerism.

The western world seemed to have lost orientation: man is left with a sense of helplessness and so all efforts are futile. Human existence seemed an imprisonment " between the compulsion of birth and the even worse compulsion of death.

Even freedom was seen as an illusion. It was described as "the freedom of the slave to crawl east along the neck of a boat travelling west".

It is a vision of the world in which man is trapped in a hostile universe. Man has no chance of happiness, he is destined to desegregation and then to silence.

This kind of theatre is not naturalistic but the authors created a surrealistic one.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURDE

they didn't intend to represent reality as it is, but a deeper reality as it is in dreams and in nightmares.

they didn't intend to represent actions, but to convey poetic images which allude to the human condition. It is more similar to poetry than to drama.

sense of confusion and despair

they experienced the emptiness which was caused by the disappearance of the system of values.

Communication is given through language, that creates correspondences between reality and the images we have of it. But if reality appears illogical, even the language is illogical, so it cannot secure communication. So language in the theatre of the absurd is seen as a way people use to fill the emptiness around them. If reality is illogical, the non sense language is more realistic than the philosophical one.