The absurd is a key word that played an important role in creating the self-awareness of the theatre of the second half of the 20th century. A person credited with coining the phrase itself and at the same time blamed for all the problems with its use, albeit unjustly, is Martin Esslin. What Esslin did was merely immortalize in the title of his best-selling book, first published in English in 1961, and in French two years later, a slogan that had already been in quite frequent use for years. After all, the concept of the theatre of the absurd was also used by Jean Cocteau as early as 1922, in the preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, as well as by George Bernard Shaw (referring to the language of drama). Jean Paul Sartre wrote in 1946 about the “absurdity of the world” in confrontation with the dramatic protagonist's free will in his “theatre of situations.” In the 1940s, the fullest explanation of the “absurd man” was provided by Albert Camus in his famous Myth of Sisyphus.

It is also known that the so-called absurdists themselves, especially Eugene Ionesco, fiercely opposed the absurdist label that was immediately attached to their dramatic works. Three years after his debut (The Bald Soprano, 1950), and eight years before the publication of Esslin's work, Ionesco found “absurd” to be a fashionable term, “vague enough now, in any case, to mean nothing any more and to be an easy definition of anything.” This did not prevent Esslin from using an appropriately adapted quote from Ionesco's essay on Kafka when defining the theatre of the absurd:

“Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose… Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.”

In the original English version of his book, Esslin made a significant shift of emphasis in the quoted definition by Ionesco: he translated “inutile” as “absurd,” whereas instead of “etouffante” (suffocating) he used the word “useless.” In addition, in the description of the lost roots of man, in addition to religion and metaphysics mentioned by Ionesco, he added a third component—transcendence. This proves Esslin's method of adjusting reality to a predetermined idea.