Taking its name from the idea of the absurd as something not grounded in logic or reason, the Theatre of the Absurd is related to aspects of EXISTENTIALISM. The movement itself actually refers to a style of drama that began in Paris and flourished in the late 1940s and 1950s. The roots of Theatre of the Absurd can be traced back as far as the morality plays of the Middle Ages, the Spanish religious allegories, the nonsensical writings of Lewis Caroll, and the macabre and grotesque drama of Alfred JARRY. It was anticipated by DADAISM and the surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s and gathers much of its theoretical accountability from Antonin ARTAUD’s text The Theatre and its Double (1938; translated 1958). The term itself comes from the use of the word absurd by existentialist philosophers such as Albert CAMUS and Jean-Paul SARTRE in reference to the lack of a rational explanation for the human condition.
Although Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1888) anticipates much of the foundation on which absurdist drama rests, the three playwrights most closely associated with the movement’s popularity are Jean GENET, Eugène IONESCO, and Samuel BECKETT. Their works take on a nightmarish quality as they examine contemporary alienation and human anxiety over the absence of social coherence or transcendental meaning. Many playwrights, such as Beckett, wrote in French though it was not their native language, and communicated a sense of linguistic estrangement.
According to some sources, Beckett was the most influential writer of the period. His Happy Days expresses humanity’s fear of death through the character of a woman who, in the first act, is buried up to her waist in a mound of dirt. By the second act, the mound has grown so that only her head remains visible, a metaphoric vision of the ultimate journey from life to death and burial.
Other playwrights of this school wrote of similar anxieties. Ionesco emphasizes the fear of mediocrity and the inability to communicate in The Bald Soprano (1950). Genet’s works, on the other hand, fuse illusion with reality in an often violently erotic manner to exemplify the absurd roles that people play in daily existence. The influence of Theatre of the Absurd, created by a group of international writers living in Paris, extends beyond France to the works of Czechoslovakian playwright Václav HAVEL, British writers Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, and U.S. dramatists Edward Albee and Sam Shepard.
