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Unit 29: Absurd Drama

that opens suddenly; indeed, many of Shakespeare’s tragedies are already really comedies out of Notes
which the tragic arises.”
Though layered with a significant amount of tragedy, the Theatre of the Absurd echoes other
great forms of comedic performance, according to Esslin, from Commedia dell’arte to Vaudeville.
Similarly,

Notes Esslin cites early film comedians and music hall artists such as Charlie Chaplin, The
Keystone Cops and Buster Keaton as direct influences.

29.4 Formal Experimentation

As an experimental form of theatre, Theatre of the Absurd employs techniques borrowed from
earlier innovators. Writers and techniques frequently mentioned in relation to the Theatre of the
Absurd include the 19th-century nonsense poets, such as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear; Polish
playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz; the Russians Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Erdman, Mikhail
Volokhov and others; Bertolt Brecht’s distancing techniques in his “Epic theatre”; and the “dream
plays” of August Strindberg.
One commonly cited precursor is Luigi Pirandello, especially Six Characters in Search of an
Author. Pirandello was a highly regarded theatrical experimentalist who wanted to bring down
the fourth wall presupposed by the realism of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen. According to W.
B. Worthen, Six Characters and other Pirandello plays use “Metatheater - role-playing, plays-
within-plays, and a flexible sense of the limits of stage and illusion—to examine a highly
theatricalized vision of identity”.
Another influential playwright was Guillaume Apollinaire whose The Breasts of Tiresias was
the first work to be called “surreal”.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The Theatre of the Absurd is a .................... originating in France in the late 1940s.
2. Critic Martin Esslin coined the term “....................” in his 1960 essay and, later, book of the
same name.
3. The mode of most “....................” plays is tragicomedy.
4. Esslin cites William Shakespeare as an influence on this aspect of the .................... .
5. One commonly cited precursor is ...................., especially six characters in search of an
Author.

29.5 Relationship with Existentialism

The Theatre of the Absurd is commonly associated with Existentialism, and Existentialism was
an influential philosophy in Paris during the rise of the Theatre of the Absurd; however, to call
it Existentialist theatre is problematic for many reasons. It gained this association partly because
it was named (by Esslin) after the concept of “absurdism” advocated by Albert Camus, a philosopher
commonly called Existentialist though he frequently resisted that label. Absurdism is most
accurately called Existentialist in the way Franz Kafka’s work is labeled Existentialist: it embodies
an aspect of the philosophy though the writer may not be a committed follower. As Tom Stoppard
said in an interview, “I must say I didn’t know what the word ‘existential’ meant until it was
applied to Rosencrantz. And even now existentialism is not a philosophy I find either attractive
or plausible. But it’s certainly true that the play can be interpreted in existential terms, as well as
in other terms.”

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