Theatre of the Absurd- A Critical Survey

Martin Esslin in his essay The Theatre of the Absurd uses the quoted phrase for the first time while analyzing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. He says that “the act of waiting for Godot is shown as essentially absurd”. However, by the words ‘Theatre of Absurd’ we mean the kind of plays, rather strange plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter etc.

Samuel Beckett

 In fact, theatre of the absurd is often applied to the plays of Engene  Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamon, Samuel Beckett, and the early plays of Edward Albee, Pinter and many such dramatists who were active in 1950s. Plays written by these playwrights flout all the standards by which drama has been judged over the centuries. Structurally, in contrast to a well made play with a beginning, middle and a neatly tied up ending, the plays by the absurdist playwrights often start at an arbitrary point and end just as arbitrarily. The arbitrary structure of the plays reflects the arbitrary and irrational nature of life. To put it differently the playwright of the absurd views life existentially, he expresses the senselessness of the human condition by abandoning rational devices. Most of the plays, thus, express a sense of wonder and incomprehension, and at times despair at the meaninglessness of human existence. Since, they do not believe in a rational and well-meaning universe, they do not see any possibility of resolution of the problems they present, either.

            The idea that man is absurd is by no means new. An awareness of the essential absurdity of much human behaviour has been inherent in the work of many writers. Aristophanes, Swift, Pope, Balzac, Dickens – to cite only a handful – has all shown an acute feeling for men’s comically. So by tradition, these absurd playwrights deal with purposelessness of life harmony with its surroundings. The absurd Drama as a genre is based on the tenets summarized by Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The man of Sisyphus, for ever rolling a stone up a hill, for ever aware that it will never reach the top is a perfect metaphor for the play Waiting For Godot too. Thus in Waiting for Godot everything can be looked up as a metaphor for the human situation at its most ‘absurd’. Godot could be taken for anything or nothing: Estragon and Vladimir, two vagabonds, complain that nothing happens nobody comes, nobody goes, and it’s awful. The Waiting For Godot composed by Beckett is a landmark in the realm of modern English drama. The drama has an ironic overtone compounded with a tragically slant. It virtually reflects the pointlessness, the meaninglessness, boredom, ennui and frustration of modern existence. The theme of the drama is all about a perpetual waiting of the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon. They wait for the arrival of ‘Godot’. But their expectation never finds fruition. In fact, this endless expectation is dashed against the rock of nothingness.

Symbolically, ‘Godot’ is represented as an unknown entity, perhaps as the highest goal which we can never reach during our life time. In fact, the modern man always aspires after a Utopia, after an El Dorado, after a never- never- world that always leads enchantment to the view. The two tramps wait for time indefinite and for a thing unknown, unfamiliar and unseen yet ever attractive and alluring as if holding the key to highest happiness. Symbolically, The Waiting For Godot may be compared to a modern Bengali novel Kothai Pabo Tare by Somoresh Bose. In fact, as a typical absurd drama, Waiting For Godot, fosters the ironic technique and philosophical outlooks typical of modernism and existentialism. 

            Beckett’s Endgame (1957) deals with the theme of loneliness and essential absurdity of life in a style of grim humour. His Happy Days surprisingly has a heroine Winnie who is throughout the play largely buried in a mound of earth, first up to her waist, then up to her neck.

            Edward Albee, the American exponent of the Absurd drama has written a famous play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The complexity of values and conditions of man is expressed in his The Zoo. Ionesco’s Bold Primadonna, Fernando’s The two Executioners are two revolutionary works. Harold Pinter, The Caretaker hints at the man’s original sin.

          

  The absurd plays are modern dark comedy or black comedy. They are constant simultaneity of tragedy and comedy. David Gross Vogel speaks of ‘Part tragedy, part comedy’ as these are comic display of human life in the labyrinth of society.

            But one must ask whether the writer of the absurd play does believe in the total meaningless of life and human existence. If the author were totally convinced of the meaninglessness of life, why would he go on living? Also, wouldn’t it be pointless to go on writing about the act of living? The mere fact of writing is an expression of meaning by imposing some kind of an order or value on experience. As Eric Bentley remarks, “Artistic activity is itself a transcendence of despair, and for unusually despairing artists that is no doubt chiefly what art is: a therapy, a faith”.

            Therefore, paradoxical as it may seem the very act of writing about despair or the mess of life, it is an attempt by the absurd writer to impose an order on ‘disorder’.         

            Ardhendu De