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The Theatre of the Absurd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2021

Martin Esslin
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Extract

The plays of Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco have been performed with astonishing success in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the English-speaking countries. This reception is all the more puzzling when one considers that the audiences concerned were amused by and applauded these plays fully aware that they could not understand what they meant or what their authors were driving at.

At first sight these plays do, indeed, confront their public with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on that seem to go counter to all accepted standards of stage convention. In these plays, some of which are labeled “anti-plays,” neither the time nor the place of the action are ever clearly stated. (At the beginning of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano the clock strikes seventeen.) The characters hardly have any individuality and often even lack a name; moreover, halfway through the action they tend to change their nature completely.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , May 1960 , pp. 3 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © The Tulane Drama Review 1960

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References

Notes

1 Ionesco, “Dans les Armes de la Ville,” Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud-Jean-Louis Barrault, No. 20 (October, 1957).

2 Adamov, “Note Préliminaire,” Théâtre II, Paris, 1955.

3 Ibid.

4 It may be significant that the three writers concerned, although they now all live in France and write in French have all come to live there from outside and must have experienced a period of adjustment to the country and its language. Samuel Beckett (b. 1906) came from Ireland; Arthur Adamov (b. 1908) from Russia, and Eugene Ionesco (b. 1912) from Rumania.

5 Ionesco, “L'Impromptu de l'Alma,” Théâtre II, Paris, 1958.

6 Ionesco, “The Avant-Garde Theatre,” World Theatre, VIII, No. 3 (Autumn, 1959).

7 Jarry, “Questions de Théâtre,” in Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchainé, and other Ubuesque writings. Ed. Rene Massat, Lausanne, 1948.

8 Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Preface.

9 Ionesco, “The Avant-Garde Theatre.“

10 Ionesco, “Ni un Dieu, ni un Demon,” Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud-Jean-Loitis Barrault, No. 22-23 (May, 1958).