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Theatre of the Absurd

Theatre of the Absurd, dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early '60s who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus's assessment, in his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed as such, dramatists as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, and a few others shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and to control its fate. Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious. The ideas that inform the plays also dictate their structure. There is little dramatic action as conventionally understood; however frantically the characters perform, their busyness serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence. In Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), plot is eliminated, and a timeless, circular quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as tramps, spend their days waiting--but without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of whether he, or it, will ever come. Language in an Absurdist play is often dislocated, full of cliches, puns, repetitions, and non sequiturs. The characters in Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) sit and talk, repeating the obvious until it sounds like nonsense, thus revealing the inadequacies of verbal communication. The ridiculous, purposeless behaviour and talk give the plays a sometimes dazzling comic surface, but there is an underlying serious message of metaphysical distress. At the same time, the impact of ideas as expressed by the Surrealist, Existentialist, and Expressionist schools and the writings of Franz Kafka is evident. Essentially, each play renders man's existence as illogical, and moreover, meaningless. This idea was a reaction to the "collapse of moral, religious, political, and social structures" following the two World Wars of the Twentieth Century (Abbotson 1).Absurdism as a philosophical movement, started in the 19th century in Europe.Plays associated with this movement generally share several characteristics, including nonsense dialogue, repetitive or meaningless action, and non-realistic or impossible plots.Theatre of the Absurd: characteristics

To sum up, the characteristics of the Theatre of the Absurd are varied, but these can be identified as common features of the Theatre of the Absurd.The Theatre of the Absurd acts as a parody of the traditions and conventions of Western culture and of generic forms of traditional drama.The dialogues in Theatre of the Absurd are purposefully made to sound ridiculous and eccentric to point out the inadequacy of language in communication.The playwrights of the Absurdist theatre devaluate language to make it comic, unsettling, and of course, absurd.The language in the plays is often incoherent and made of pointless dialogues full of puns and repetitions.The Theatre of the Absurd (or Absurdist drama) is a genre of drama that explores ideas connected to absurdism.Different types of slapstick are used to capture the alienation and anguish of being human.The characters continue to struggle despite not having a purpose or meaning, trying to find sense in the senseless and to communicate the uncommunicable.Absurdism deals with the human search for meaning that often fails and reveals that life is illogical and absurd.Plays in this tradition tend to be comic by including the irrational and inconsequential in the plot.One of the main absurdist philosophers was Albert Camus (1913- 1960).?