Theatre of the Absurd
Unlike other movements within the avant-garde, Theater of the Absurd lacks a manifesto or basic tenets. Unlike the Futurist or Dadaist movements, Theatre of the Absurd was not a practice defined by its practitioners. Instead, Martin Esslin, in his essay, “The Theatre of the Absurd” groups several practitioners together noting the common theme of the absurd in the way that Camus used the term in his Essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In his essay, Esslin said, “The decline of religious faith, the destruction of the belief in automatic social and biological progress, the discovery of vast areas of irrational and unconscious forces within the human psyche, the loss of a sense of control over rational human development in the age of totalitarianism and weapons of mass destruction, have all contributed to the erosion of the basis for a dramatic convention in which the action proceeds within a fixed and self-evident framework of generally accepted values.” (Esslin 6) He is noting that without the prescribed values from existing systems, which have eroded due to various events and movements, existing drama has become inefficient at expressing the uncertainly of a world without meaning. The form was first popularized by Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950). Ionesco once said, “It’s not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it’s mankind.” His anti-plays reflected the fact that life is not like the conventional drama where everything happens for a reason and is all resolved at the end. The form further shows that theatre can be made outside of theatrical convention and still be effective. Others attributed to this form include Becket, Adamov, and Genet.
Theatre of the Absurd was conceptual in nature, and shunned common theatrical convention in a variety of ways. First, it often abandoned cause and effect relationships, getting rid of the standard theatrical structure of plot. Plays tend to be circular and problems seldom resolve. Characters tend to be archetypes or generalizations of a character lacking specificity. Sometimes the characters are even given generic or numerical names. Time is generalized or doesn’t function like time in real life and locations can be generalized or symbolic. “The Theatre of the Absurd, that is, gives up the search for a dramatic model through which to discover fundamental ethical or philosophical certainties about life and the world.” (Cardullo 353)
Practitioners of The Theatre of The Absurd were very much concerned with the fact that not everything we say conveys what we mean. Language obeys the laws of grammar, which are, in fact, arbitrary. If we employ language when we think, then our thinking must follow those rules, thereby arbitrarily constraining thought. We must learn to think beyond the arbitrary given to us by language. Ionesco said, “It becomes necessary to break up our language so that it may become possible to put it together again and to reestablish contact with the absolute, or as I should prefer to call it, with multiple reality.” (Esslin 11) Characters play word games, repeat clichés, distort sounds, or make language sound as mechanical as possible. Words, typically, go counter to actions. Conversations degenerate, the somber can become grotesque, and the comic can become tragic. Esslin says that scenes within the Theatre of the absurd can potentially “get bogged down in endless repetitions like a phonograph record stuck in one groove” (3).
Lastly, spectators often walk away from performances not knowing that the playwright’s intentions had been. They take the time to ponder its meaning. Therefore, the suspense is created in not how the play progresses, but in determining what it means to you, the spectator. That suspense can last well after seeing the play. The overall goal of this movement was to make audiences think about our flawed and sometimes meaningless methods of communication, how many meaningless clichés we say in our day to day conversations, if we have any effect over our destiny and to ultimately understand that, no matter how much effort we put into actions, we all ultimately achieve the same result, death.