The Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd

Initially, the Theatre of the Absurd was a term invented by the critic Martin Esslin in his 1960 essay Theatre of the Absurd. As a style, it primarily relates to a Western playwright-based style of theatre and a group of plays primarily written in the mid-twentieth century by European playwrights which explores what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down, The form explores how logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence. The Absurd in these plays takes the form of human beings reaction to a world apparently without meaning, and/or humans as puppets controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. 

Though the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, vaudeville elements, absurd and tragic imagery mixed together, characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions, dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense, plots that are cyclical.

Although the form becomes popular during the 1950’s and 1960’s, many believe that Theatre of the Absurd starts with the French Symbolist Ubu plays of Alfred Jarry in 1896. Another early pioneer of the absurd was Italian playwright, novelist and short story writer Luigi Pirandello whose plays So It Is (If You Think So) in 1917 and Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1921 start to develop the ideas and conventions we relate with the Theatre of the Absurd. 

Many consider the Theatre of the Absurd as a male dominated form of theatre. Some even think of it as misogynistic as a form. The important contributions of women in hybrid forms that include aspects of the Theatre of the Absurd are vital to the evolution of the style.  Playwright/performers such Else Lasker-Schüler (née Elisabeth Schüler) paved the way for a form of the absurd that was physical in its form. 

Else Lasker-Schüler was a German-Jewish playwright, performer, painter and poet born in 1869 in Elberfield in Germany.  After moving to Berlin around 1890 she became heavily involved in the literary scene. When she remarried the Expressionist artist and founder of the art magazine Der Sturm in 1903, she started to become prolific as a writer and artist. In 1907, her prose collection Die Nächte der Tino von Bagdad started her exploration of absurdist forms. This was soon followed by the publication of her first play Die Wupper in 1909. The play was not publicly performed until 1919 in Berlin. This five act play is considered by most to be one of the first absurdist plays by a woman due to its divergent narrative structure along with its atmospheric broad strokes and emphasis on the meaninglessness of relationships and interactions emphasise stylistic qualities of this theatre style. Lasker-Schüler was actively shunned in the 1920s by the mainstream art, poetry and theatre scenes. In 1927, the death of her son sent her into a deep depression which lasted much of her life. With the rise of Nazism, she left Germany for Zurich and then eventually for Israel where she lived in poverty often mocked for her eccentric dress and behaviour. Her last two plays Arthur Aronymus : die Geschichte meines Vaters  (Arthur Aronymus and his ancestors) and Ich und ich (I and I) are considered Absurdist masterpieces. Living a hand to mouth daily life in Jerusalem, she died eventually of a heart attack in 1945. She was buried by friends and admirers at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in Israel.  

Another important female pioneer of the absurdist performance form was Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Plötz) 

The German Absurdist and Dada performance artist, poet and assemblage artist Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Plötz) was born in 1874 and worked in both Germany and America before returning to Germany where she died in 1927. She trained as an actress, cabaret and vaudeville performer and became very involved in the artistic life in both Munich and Dachau. In 1913, Elsa married her third husband, the Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven and she became Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the name she became known for as an artist. Elsa moved to New York, living on and off with her new husband while also working as an artist’s model while also and shifts in a cigarette factory. In 1917, she created her first assemblage absurd art pieces. In New York, she started to create art and performance pieces out of street rubbish. She created costumes for her performances and daily life out of rubbish, found objects and domestic items and her performances and her life became a ‘living collage’ commenting on the landscape of the artificial  boundaries between life and art. Her costumes attacked the bourgeoisie concepts of consumer wealth and traditional definitions of femininity and female beauty. Her body became a deliberate performance space to explore the constraints of femininity and notions of gender and androgyny. In her performances she would also play with scents and smells and allegedly even uses menstrual blood in some performances. While some of her art works such as God and her poetry still exist today. Very few photographs appear of her performance and living art pieces. Recent research suggests that the Dada artist Duchamp’s notion of found art came through his correspondence with or him hearing about Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s work. Freytag-Loringhoven returned to Germany in 1923, lived in Berlin and then the Weimar Rebuplic but ended up virtually penniless and on the streets suffering from depression and mental illness. Her health in 1926 when she moved to Paris. She would be seen on the streets of Paris sometimes performing her poetry in her went ‘assemblage’ and d’domestic object’ art outfits. On December 14 1928 she died in her small flat due to gas suffocation after the gas was left on. It was never clear whether she forgetfully left it on, left it on intentionally or whether someone else turn on the gas and left. 

The French playwright, poet and activist Jean Genet then took up the mantle of the absurdist form in the 1930s and 1940s. Genet's mother was a sex worker and he only lived with her for seven months before he was taken away from her and put in the foster system. His foster family were loving but Genet kept running away and after many acts of vagrancy, he was placed in a penal colony. We know that Genet started writing when he returned to Paris in 1937. He was arrested on many occasions by both French and German authorities. Around this time he self-published his first poems and the novel Our Lady of Flowers (1944). From prison, he wrote his first plays Deathwatch (1944) and The Maids (1946). In 1949, prominent artists and writers including Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso successfully petitioned the French President to have Genet's life sentence commuted and have him released from jail, never to return. He then went on to write some of his greatest dramatic works The Balcony (1955), The Blacks (1955) and The Screens (1956). Much of his later life was devoted to writing and activism.

The work of Genet was soon followed by the two playwrights who are considered the masters of the Theatre of the Absurd, French playwright Eugene Ionesco and the Irish writer who wrote his work almost exclusively in French Samuel Beckett. 

Ionesco’s work includes The Bald Prima Donna (1948), The Lesson (1950), The Chairs (1952), The New Tenant (1953), The Killer (1959) and Rhinoceros (1959). 

Samuel Beckett wrote novels, poetry and plays from 1936 right up until his death in 1989. Some of his most well known Theatre of the Absurd plays are Waiting for Godot (1952), Act Without Words I and Act Without Words II (1957), Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1951), Breath (1969), Not I (1972) and Catastrophe (1982) and What Where (1983).

Some other playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd include Spaniard Fernando Arrabal (Picnic on the Battlefield in 1958, Automobile Graveyard in 1966 and The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria in 1967), Englishmen Harold Pinter (The Room and The Birthday Party both written in 1957, The Dumb Waiter and The Caretaker both written in 1959 and The Homecoming written in 1964) and Tom Stoppard (A Walk on Water in 1964, Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead in 1966 and Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth both written in 1979), American playwright Edward Albee (The Zoo Story in 1958, The Sandbox in 1959 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1962) and Czech writer, philosopher, dissident, stateman and playwright Václav Havel whose absurdist works include The Garden Party (1963), The Memorandum (1965) and Audience (1975).

While some people argue that the Theatre of the Absurd is exclusively the domain of male playwrights and theatre makers, there are a number of examples of female playwrights and practitioners whose work should be added to the canon of Absurdists. 

The American playwright Tina Howe (born in 1937) is able to tread the fine line between Absurdism and Realism in her many of her plays. Her 1976 play Museum which involves 55 characters at a group art show and the dialogue and structure of the play has elements of the Theatre of the Absurd. The Art of Dining (1979) uses food and dining (two of Howe's favourite themes) to explore the absurd timeless environment of waiting for a meal. It has the detail of Beckett and Ionesco in the way that action, situation, dialogue and detail work together to create the absurd. Howe's 1986 play Coastal Disturbances which is set on a beach and required six tonnes of sand for the first production shows how situation and character can drive Absurdist drama rather than language. Many of her later plays are not strictly Absurdist in their style but use many elements and conventions of the Theatre of the Absurd. These include One Show Off (1993), Pride's Crossing (1997), Rembrandt's Gift (2002) and Chasing Manet (2009). Howe has also done a number of translations of the plays of Ionesco.

The major conventions and traits of the Theatre of the Absurd are

·      Time, place and identity are ambiguous and fluid, and even basic causality frequently breaks down

·      Use of non-realistic or surreal characters and/or situations

·      Meaningless or seemingly illogical plots, repetitive or nonsensical dialogue

·      Seemingly meaningful or artful use of meaningless chaos and non-realistic elements

·      Use of some quite random and meaningless elements on the surface, but meaning normally emerges from the chaos

·      Human condition portrayed as meaningless, absurd, illogical

·      Language, words and communication often appear to have lost their denotative function, thus creating misunderstanding among the characters

·      Minimal plot, minimal staging, babbling; abstract setting, arbitrary illogical action

·      The language and poetry of Absurdist Theater emerges from concrete and objectified images of the stage

Exercises

1. The Theatre of the Absurd often relies on meaning utterances being deprived of their meaning or emotion. Get students to rehearse doing an emotional speech in an unemotional or almost monotonal way. Alternatively, take this speech from Beckett's Endgame where Clov is asked by Hamm to express something "...from his heart..." and then Clove utters this speech in an unemotional and detached way with a fixed gaze and toneless:

CLOV (fixed gaze, tonelessly, towards auditorium):

They said to me, That's love, yes, yes, not a doubt, now you see how—

How easy it is. They said to me, That's friendship, yes, yes, no question, you've found it. They said to me, Here's the place, stop, raise your head and look at all that beauty. That order! They said to me, Come now, you're not a brute beast, think upon these things and you'll see how all becomes clear. And simple! They said to me, What skilled attention they get, all these dying of their wounds.

2. Sometimes the Theatre of the Absurd makes an everyday dialogue out of non-related phrases and utterances being put together in unrelated circumstances. Have students create unusual circumstances for a scene such as at a funeral and have then utter unrelated senteces in their dialogue. Or alternatively, have students do the following dialogue from Ionesco's Bald Prima Donna:

"Mrs. Martin: I can buy a pocketknife for my brother, but you can't buy Ireland for your grandfather.

Mr. Smith: "One walks on his feet, but one heats with electricity or coal." 

3. The silences and pauses in Theatre of the Absurd are very important. To have students examine the importance and effect of pauses in scenes, have the students in groups of two or three write a one page scene. Perhaps the scene is between two strangers or two friends who have not seen one another in a long time. Get the students to do the scene four times:

a) Once with no pauses

b) Once with three second pauses between each line

c) Once with ten second pauses between each line

d) End with varying the pauses from non-existent to three second to ten seconds.

Get the students to reflect on how pauses can change meaning, mood and relationships.

Bibliography and Resources

Cornwell, N. (2006). The absurd in literature. Manchester University Press: Manchester, UK.

Dickson, A. (2017). Nonsense talk: Theatre of the Absurd. British Library 20th Century Literature: London\, UK. Retrieved from https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/nonsense-talk-theatre-of-the-absurd

Esslin, M. (1961). The Theatre of the Absurd, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Melcher, S. (2012). Gender and the Absurd - Camus, Esslin, Playwrights and the Consequences of Feminism. Retrieved from  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5362ee0ae4b035b5651b733b/t/549a4948e4b0f9927d7c65f3/1419397448032/Gender+and+the+Absurd.pdf

QWikLit. August 21, 2013. Theatre of the Absurd: 15 Essential Plays. QWikLit. Retrieved from https://qwiklit.com/2013/08/21/theater-of-the-absurd-15-essential-plays/

Rupert D. V. Glasgow, R.D.V. (1995). Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press: Madison NJ.


Styan, J.L. (1868).. The dark comedy: the development of modern comic tragedy. Cambridge University Press: London.

Websites

https://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlights/17/download

https://dramateachersnetwork.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/lesson-lovenotes-teaching-resources-and-suggestions-for-the-theatre-of-the-absurd/

http://www.thedramateacher.com/the-challenges-of-teaching-absurdism/

http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/fenimore/ch202h/sosnowski/

https://qwiklit.com/2013/08/21/theater-of-the-absurd-15-essential-plays/