Couple Words On Absurd Theatre

Absurd Theatre is a movement made up of diverse plays mostly written around 1940 and 1960. During their debut, these plays shocked the audience as they were different from other plays of the time. Many absurd plays were labeled as anti-plays as they were so unconventional. It is named as such because of the theme of the plays. All of the plays emphasized the absurdity of the human condition. Each play deals with existence as illogical or meaningless. The cause of this creation was the corruption in moral, religious, and political values after both world wars.

The movement was influenced mostly by existential philosophy. It is rather closer to Albert Camus' essay The Myth of Sisyphus. In his essay, Camus attempts to present a reasonable answer as to why a man should not commit suicide in face of a meaningless, absurd existence. To do so, he uses the Greek mythological figure, Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll back down. He repeats this futile cycle for all of eternity. At the end of the essay, Camus concludes that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. He means that the struggle of life alone should bring one happiness. Essentially, we can find meaning in living even without knowing why we exist. The absurd dramatists, however, did not resolve the problem of mankind's meaningless existence quite as positively as Camus. In fact, they typically offered no solution to the problem whatsoever, thus suggesting that the question is ultimately unanswerable.

Absurd theatre considers meaning as a human concept and suggests that individuals must create significance and not rely on institutions or traditions to prove it. Two themes that reoccur frequently throughout absurdist dramas are a meaningless world and the isolation of the individual. The decline of religious faith in the twentieth century after world war is partly responsible for the growing notion that life had no identifiable purpose. Whereas one who believes in the afterlife sees life as a means of getting there, one who does not believe is left to either conclude that there is no purpose or to find an alternative justification for their life.

In his play, The Chairs, Ionesco capitalizes on this meaninglessness. Throughout the play, the two main characters prepare chairs for invisible guests who are all coming to hear the meaning of life as declared by an orator. The main characters kill themselves just before he speaks and then the audience discovers that the orator is a deaf mute. Ionesco himself described the subject of the play as, “not the message, nor the failures of life, nor the moral disaster of the two old people, but the chairs themselves; that is to say, the absence of people, the absence of the emperor, the absence of God, the absence of matter, the unreality of the world, metaphysical emptiness”. This kind of worldview is characteristic of the Theatre of the Absurd.

The playwrights involved with the Theatre of the Absurd were not conscious of belonging to a movement while writing their plays. Ironically, they each thought of themselves as lone outsiders cut off and isolated in their own private worlds. This perspective clearly penetrates their work, as most of the plays emphasize the isolation of the individual, or man’s inability to connect with others.

One characteristic of the absurd theatre was the devaluation of language. The absurd dramatists felt that conventional language had failed man–it was an inadequate means of communication. As a result, the movement of the characters on stage often contradicts their words or dialogue. For example, both acts of Waiting for Godot conclude with the line “Yes, let’s go,” only to be followed by the stage direction, “They do not move”. Essentially, the dramatists are trying to emphasize a disconnect between “word and object, meaning and reality, consciousness and the world” . Moreover, in doing so they expose how unreliable language is; one can easily say one thing and do the opposite. Another common way in which they presented the uselessness of language was by having their characters constantly speak in cliches, or overused, tired expressions. 

Another poetic aspect of absurdist plays is that they lack a plot or a clear beginning and end with a purposeful development in between. There is usually a great deal of repetition in both language and action, which suggests that the play isn’t actually “going anywhere.” In Waiting for Godot, the stage directions indicate that Vladimir and Estragon are constantly moving. For example, they repeatedly “rummage” through their pockets and “peer” into their hats. These actions are so frequent, however, that the audience begins to feel as if they are watching the same thing over and over again. They could even be called static actions as they contribute nothing to the flow of the play. Yet this lack of purposeful movement in Waiting for Godot and most other absurdist dramas is intentional.

The absurd dramatists were the first to propagate this idea of acceptance in the face of absurdity. In doing so, they challenged the preconceptions of what does and does not constitute theatre. Essentially, the absurd dramatists redefined the art form and created a space in which succeeding movements could flourish.