The Theatre of The Absurd
The Theatre of The Absurd
The Theatre of The Absurd
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MARTIN
ESSLIN
share of protests and scandals, do arouse interest and are received with
laughter and thoughtful respect. What is the explanation for this curious
phenomenon?
The most obvious, but perhaps too facile answer that suggests itself
is that these plays are prime examples of "pure theatre." They are living
proof that the magic of the stage can persist even outside, and divorced
from, any framework of conceptual rationality. They prove that exits
and entrances, light and shadow, contrasts in costume, voice, gait and
behavior, pratfalls and embraces, all the manifold mechanical interactions of human puppets in groupings that suggest tension, conflict, or the
relaxation of tensions, can arouse laughter or gloom and conjure up an
atmosphere of poetry even if devoid of logical motivation and unrelated
to recognizable human characters, emotions, and objectives.
But this is only a partial explaration. While the element of "pure
theatre" and abstract stagecraft is certainly at work in the plays concerned, they also have a much more substantial content and meaning.
Not only do all these plays make sense, though perhaps not obvious or
conventional sense, they also give expression to some of the basic issues
and problems of our age, in a uniquely efficient and meaningful manner,
so that they meet some of the deepest needs and unexpressed yearnings of
their audience.
The three dramatists that have been grouped together here would
probably most energetically deny that they form anything like a school
or movement. Each of them, in fact, has his own roots and sources, his
own very personal approach to both form and subject matter. Yet they
also clearly have a good deal in common. This common denominator
that characterizes their works might well be described as the element of
the absurd. "Est absurde ce qui n'a pas de but..." ("Absurd is that which
has no purpose, or goal, or objective"), the definition given by Ionesco
in a note on Kafka,1certainly applies to the plays of Beckett and Ionesco
as well as those of Arthur Adamov up to his latest play, Paolo Paoli, when
he returned to a more traditional form of social drama.
Each of these writers, however, has his own special type of absurdity:
in Beckett it is melancholic, colored by a feeling of futility born from the
disillusionment of old age and chronic hopelessness; Adamov's is more
active, aggressive, earthy, and tinged with social and political overtones;
while lonesco's absurdity has its own fantastic knock-about flavor of tragical clowning. But they all share the same deep sense of human isolation
and of the irremediable character of the human condition.
As Arthur Adamov put it in describing how he came to write his first
play, La Parodie (1947):
I began to discover stage scenes in the most common-place everyday
events. [One day I saw] a blind man begging; two girls went by without
seeing him, singing: "I closed my eyes; it was marvelo.us!"This gave me
the idea of showing on stage, as crudely and as visibly as possible, the
loneliness of man, the absenceof communicationamong human beings.2
MARTIN
ESSLIN
MARTIN ESSLIN
.6
What is the tradition with which the Theatre of the Absurd-at first
sight the most revolutionary and radically new movement-is trying to
link itself? It is in fact a very ancient and a very rich tradition, nourished
from many and varied sources: the verbal exuberance and extravagant
inventions of Rabelais, the age-old clowning of the Roman mimes and
the Italian Cornmedia dell'Arte, the knock-about humor of circus clowns
like Grock; the wild, archetypal symbolism of English nonsense verse, the
baroque horror of Jacobean dramatists like Webster or Tourneur, the
harsh, incisive and often brutal tones of the German drama of Grabbe,
Biichner, Kleist, and Wedekiind with its delirious language and grotesque
inventiveness; and the Nordic paranoia of the dreams and persecution
fantasies of Strindberg.
All these streams, however, first came together and crystallized in the
more direct ancestors of the present Theatre of the Absurd. Of these,
undoubtedly the first and foremost is Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), the creator of Ubu Roi, the first play which clearly belongs in the category of
the Theatre of the Absurd. Ubu Roi, first performed in Paris on December 10, 1896, is a Rabelaisian nonsense drama about the fantastic adventures of a fat, cowardly, and brutal figure, Ic pere Ubu, who makes himself King of Poland, fights a series of Falstaffian battles, and is finally
routed. As if to challenge all accepted codes of propriety and thus to open
a new era of irreverence, the play opens with the defiant expletive,
"Merdre!" which immediately provoked a scandal. This, of course, was
what Jarry had intended. Ubu, in its rollicking Rabelaisian parody of a
Shakespearean history play, was meant to confront the Parisian bourgeois
with a monstrous portrait of his own greed, selfishness, and philistinism:
"As the curtain went up I wanted to confront the public with a theatre
in which, as in the magic mirror ... of the fairy tales... the vicious man
sees his reflection with bulls' horns and the body of a dragon, the projections of his viciousness...." But Ubu is more than a mere monstrous
exaggeration of the selfishness and crude sensuality of the French bourgeois. He is at the same time the personification of thle grossness of human nature, an enormous belly walking on two legs. That is why Jarry
MARTIN ESSLIN
Accordingly, in Les Mamelles de Tiresias the whole population of Zanzibar, where the scene is laid, is represented by a single actor; and the
heroine, Therese, changes herself into a man by letting her breasts float
upwards like a pair of toy balloons. Although Les Mamelles de Tiresias
was not a surrealist work in the strictest sense of the term, it clearly foreshadowed the ideas of the movement led by Andre Breton. Surrealism in
that narrower, technical sense found little expression in the theatre.
But Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), another major influence in the development of the Theatre of the Absurd, did at one time belong to the Surrealist group, although his main activity in the theatre took place after
he had broken with Breton. Artaud was one of the most unhappy men
of genius of his age, an artist consumed by the most intense passions; poet,
actor, director, designer, immensely fertile and original in his inventions
and ideas, yet always living on the borders of sanity and never able to
realize his ambitions, plans, and projects.
Artaud, who had been an actor in Charles Dullin's company at the
Atelier, began his venture into the realm of experimental theatre in a
series of productions characteristically sailing under the label Theadtre
Alfred Jarry (1927-29). But his theories of a new and revolutionary theatre only crystallized after he had been deeply stirred by a performance of
Balinese dancers at the Colonial Exhibition of 1931. He formulated his
ideas in a series of impassioned manifestoes later collected in the volume
The Theatre and Its Double (1938), which continues to exercise an important influence on the contemporary French theatre. Artaud named the
theatre of his dreams Theatre de la Cruaute, a theatre of cruelty, which,
he said, "means a theatre difficult and cruel above all for myself." "Everything that is really active is cruelty. It is around this idea of action carried to the extreme that the theatre must renew itself." Here too the idea
of action larger and more real than life is the dominant theme. "Every
performance will contain a physical and objective element that will be
felt by all. Cries, Wails, Apparitions, Surprises, Coups de Theatre of all
kinds, the magical beauty of costumes inspired by the model of certain
rituals...." The language of the drama must also undergo a change:
"It is not a matter of suppressing articulate speech but of giving to the
words something like the importance they have in dreams." In Artaud's
new theatre "not only the obverse side of man will appear but also the
reverse side of the coin: the reality of imagination and of dreams will
here be seen on an equal footing with everyday life."
Artaud's only attempt at putting these theories to the test on the stage
took place on May 6, 1935 at the Folies-Wagram. Artaud had made his
own adaptation ("after Shelley and Stendhal") of the story of the Cenci,
that sombre Renaissance story of incest and patricide. It was in many
ways a beautiful and memorable performance, but full of imperfections
10
MARTIN ESSLIN
11
beled the absurd," lonesco says, "is only the denunciation of the ridiculous nature of a language which is empty of substance, made up of cliches
and slogans...."' Such a language has atrophied; it has ceased to be the
expression of anything alive or vital and has been degraded into a mere
conventional token of human intercourse, a mask for genuine meaning
and emotion. That is why so often in the Theatre of the Absurd the
dialogue becomes divorced from the real happenings in the play and is
even put into direct contradiction with the action. The Professor and
the Pupil in lonesco's The Lesson "seem" to be going through a repetition
of conventional school book phrases, but behind this smoke screen of
language the real action of the play pursues an entirely different course
with the Professor, vampire-like, draining the vitality from the young
girl up to the final moment when he plunges his knife into her body. In
Beckett's Waiting for Godot Lucky's much vaunted philosophical wisdom
is revealed to be a flood of completely meaningless gibberish that vaguely
resembles the language of philosophical argument. And in Adamov's remarkable play, Ping-Pong, a good deal of the dramatic power lies in the
contrapuntal contrast between the triviality of the theme-the improvement of pinball machines-and the almost religious fervor with which
it is discussed. Here, in order to bring out the full meaning of the play,
the actors have to act against the dialogue rather than with it, the fervor
of the delivery must stand in a dialectical contrast to the pointlessness
of the meaning of the lines. In the same way, the author implies that
most of the fervent and passionate discussion of real life (of political controversy, to give but one example) also turns around empty and meaningless cliches. Or, as lonesco says in an essay on Antonin Artaud:
As our knowledgebecomesincreasinglydivorced from real life, our culture no longer contains ourselves(or only contains an insignificantpart of
ourselves)and formsa "social"context in which we are not integrated.The
problem thus becomesthat of again reconcilingour culture with our life by
making our culture a living culture once more. But to achieve this end we
shall first have to kill the "respectfor that which is written"... it becomes
necessaryto break up our languageso that it may becomepossible to put it
together again and to reestablishcontact with the absolute, or as I should
prefer to call it, with multiple reality.
This quest for the multiple reality of the world which is real because
it exists on many planes simultaneously and is more than a mere unidirectional abstraction is not only in itself a search for a reestablished
poetical reality (poetry in its essence expressing reality in its ambiguity
and multidimensional depth); it is also in close accord with important
movements of our age in what appear to be entirely different fields: psychology and philosophy. The dissolution, devaluation, and relativization
of language is, after all, also the theme of much of present-day depthpsychology, which has shown what in former times was regarded as a
rational expression of logically arrived at conclusions to be the mere
12
MARTIN ESSLIN
13
14
his native town, now entirely inhabited by rhinos, they might regard this
as a poetic symbol of the gradual isolation of man growing old and imprisoned in the strait jacket of his own habits and memories. Does Godot,
so fervently and vainly awaited by Vladimir and Estragon, stand for God?
Or does he merely represent the ever elusive tomorrow, man's hope that
one day something will happen that will render his existence meaningful?
The force and poetic power of the play lie precisely in the impossibility
of ever reaching a conclusive answer to this question.
Here we touch the essential point of difference between the conventional theatre and the Theatre of the Absurd. The former, based as it is
on a known framework of accepted values and a rational view of life, always starts out by indicating a fixed objective towards which the action
will be moving or by posing a definite problem to which it will supply an
answer. Will Hamlet revenge the murder of his father? Will Iago succeed in destroying Othello? Will Nora leave her husband? In the conventional theatre the action always proceeds towards a definable end.
The spectators do not know whether that end will be reached and how
it will be reached. Hence, they are in suspense, eager to find out what
will happen. In the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, the action
does not proceed in the manner of a logical syllogism. It does not go
from A to B but travels from an unknown premise X towards an unknowable conclusion Y. The spectators, not knowing what their author
is driving at, cannot be in suspense as to how or whether an expected
objective is going to be reached. They are not, therefore, so much in
suspense as to what is going to happen next (although the most unexpected and unpredictable things do happen) as they are in suspense about
what the next event to take place will add to their understanding of
what is happening. The action supplies an increasing number of contradictory and bewildering clues on a number of different levels, but the
final question is never wholly answered. Thus, instead of being in suspense as to what will happen next, the spectators are, in the Theatre of
the Absurd, put into suspense as to what the play may mean. This suspense continues even after the curtain has come down. Here again the
Theatre of the Absurd fulfills Brecht's postulate of a critical, detached
audience, who will have to sharpen their wits on the play and be stimulated by it to think for themselves, far more effectively than Brecht's own
theatre. Not only are the members of the audience unable to identify
with the characters, they are compelled to puzzle out the meaning of
what they have seen. Each of them will probably find his own, personal
meaning, which will differ from the solution found by most others. But
he will have been forced to make a mental effort and to evaluate an experience he has undergone. In this sense, the Theatre of the Absurd is
the most demanding, the most intellectual theatre. It may be riotously
funny, wildly exaggerated and oversimplified, vulgar and garish, but it
will always confront the spectator with a genuine intellectual problem, a
philosophical paradox, which he will have to try to solve even if he
knows that it is most probably insoluble.
15
MARTIN ESSLIN
4It
may be significantthat the three writersconcerned,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 lonesco (b. 1912)from Rumania.
5 Ionesco,
"L'Impromptude l'Alma,"ThddtreII, Paris, 1958.
7Jarry,"Questionsde The6tre," in Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchaind,and other Ubuesque writings. Ed. Rene Massat,Lausanne, 1948.