The Theater of the Absurd was a mid-20th century movement that rejected realism and formal conventions. Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter were leading playwrights. Their works featured minimalist sets, repetitive dialogue, and archetypal characters.
Theater of the Absurd was a mid-20th century theater movement that began as a reaction to the structured formats of realism. Absurd plays ignored formal conventions, such as the unity of time and action, and often ignored complicated characters in favor of archetypal or metaphorical figures. Theater critic Martin Esslin, in his essays on the absurd, pointed out several fundamentally absurd playwrights including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov and Jean Genet.
Samuel Beckett is perhaps the best known of the absurd playwrights. Born in 1906 and raised in Ireland, Beckett attended Trinity College Dublin and spent several years as an English teacher and literary critic. After World War II, in which he served as a member of the French Resistance, Beckett began writing plays. Two of his works, Waiting For Godot and Endgame, are probably the best known and most often produced absurd comedies. Beckett’s works are characterized by minimalist sets and costumes, repetitive dialogue, and story lines that lead nowhere.
Like Beckett, Eugene Ionesco did not begin writing plays until the end of his career. He wrote poetry and literary criticism before writing his first one-act absurdist, The Bald Soprano, in 1948. Of the absurdist playwrights, Ionesco is best known for his use of gibberish and rhyme. He used language to create rhythmic patterns, despite the total inconsistency of their meaning. Many of Ionesco’s plays use the same character, called Berenger, who appears as an ordinary hero in Rhinoceros, The Killer and Exit The King.
Arthur Adamov is said to have said that he is not entirely sure why he wrote plays. Though characterized as a leading playwright of the absurd, Adamov was a student of the Surrealist movement, studying extensively with fellow playwrights August Strindberg and Bertolt Brecht. His plays, which include La Parodie (1947), Le Professeur Taranne and Ping-Pong (1953), often take place in settings directly inspired by his dreams. Adamov died in 1970 after an accidental overdose of barbiturates.
The first of the absurd playwrights to have his play widely produced in the United States was Jean Genet. After a childhood spent in foster homes, a short prison sentence, and several years as a thief and prostitute, Genet turned to writing novels and plays. His absurd plays are characterized by themes of social injustice, the relationship between tyrants and those who oppress, and open homosexuality. His third play, The Blacks, was staged in New York in 1961 and was the longest-running non-musical Off-Broadway production of the decade. The original cast included several notable actors, including Maya Angelou, James Earl Jones and Roscoe Lee Brown.
In later writings on The Theater of the Absurd, Martin Essin added a fifth writer, Harold Pinter, as a leading playwright of the absurd. Harold Pinter was born in 1930 and began working as an actor and writer in the 1950s. Pinter’s absurdist comedies, including The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, are notorious for their use of scripted pauses, often in the middle of a sentence or thought. Often, all the characters pause, leaving the stage silent for an undetermined amount of time. Some critics believe that two distinct dramas take place in Pinter’s work, the verbal and the non-verbal, and that what the characters don’t say is as important as what they say.
Essin has pointed to several later works which they classify as absurdist, but these tend to be singular comedies by an author not primarily working in the genre. Valclev Havel, Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee all have plays considered to conform to the principle of the absurd. True playwrights of the absurd are notable for their frequent or constant use of the form throughout their work, with the five listed above generally considered by pundits to provide the best examples of the genre.
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