The theater of the absurd
After a mistake that I did in my extended essay concerning the term absurdism I decided to make my own research concerning absurdism and the theater of the absurd.
After the Second World War, artists were uncertain of how to create, following the war's grave consequences and the Nazi atrocities. After the desolation of life, peace and meanings that were previously accepted, were now left without any sense. The artistic response was based on the bleakness of the post-Second World War period. Sometimes, humor and laughter were the only choices of dealing with the immense pain people went through.
“I have attempted…to exteriorize, by using objects, the anguish of my characters, to make set speak and the action on the stage more visual, to translate into concrete images terror, regret, remorse, and estrangement, to play with words and even perhaps to deform them- which is generally accepted in the work of poets and humorists. I have thus sought to extend the idiom of theatre.”[1]
The word absurdism is often used to refer to European drama in the 1950-the 60s, by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, often grouped together as the “Theatre of the Absurd”. The term the theatre of the absurd was coined by Martin Esslin, a Hungarian- born British theatre critic and academic[2]. Based on his study of the plays of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and other playwrights, he wrote the book The Theatre of Absurd (1961-2) in which he analyzed and defined their absurdity.[3] “…Ionesco’s absurdity has its own fantastic knock-about flavor of tragical clowning. But they all share the same deep sense of human isolation and the irremediable character of the human condition” [4] (Esslin, 1960). This movement goes against any type of rationalism and realism and pushes the theatre to the extreme. Questions of reality are often met in this drama in the form of a nightmare rather than something funny.
The theatre of the absurd makes the normal unstable and leaves the spectators to deal with this instability in any way they can. “The world to me is a comedy because it is ridiculous. It’s comical because it’s tragic. Comedy is more tragic than the tragedy.”[5]. The Theatre of the Absurd can be perceived as an antiplay, as Ionesco has described his own plays. When I first read the first scene of the play, I had no idea that The Bald Soprano is an anti-play and Ι had never expected to read such an absurd text.
[1] “Nonsense Talk: Theatre of the Absurd.” The British Library, The British Library, 3 Aug. 2017, www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/nonsense-talk-theatre-of-the-absurd.
[2] “Martin Esslin.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 Jan. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Esslin.
[3] Esslin, Martin. “The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin: 9781400075232: PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.” PenguinRandomhouse.com, Knopf, www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/47062/the-theatre-of-the-absurd-by-martin-esslin/9781400075232/.
[4] Esslin, Martin. “The Theatre of the Absurd.” The Tulane Drama Review, vol.4, no.4, May 1960, pp.3-15. The MIT Press in collaboration with JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1124873?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
[5] “Interview with Ionesco Part 1.” Interview with Ionesco Part 1, YouTube, 24 Apr. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qih8bwcfh1U . Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.