Essay on "Absurd Drama"
Unit-II
drama
"Absurd Drama"
The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction that have in common the view that the human condition is essentially absurd and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. Both the mood and dramaturgy of absurdity were anticipated as early as 1896 in Alfred Jarry’s French play Ubu roi (Ubu the King). The literature has its roots also in the movements of expressionism and surrealism, as well as in the fiction, written in the 1920s, of Franz Kafka (The Trial, Metamorphosis). The current movement, however, emerged in France after the horrors of World War II (1939–45) as a rebellion against basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and literature.
Another French
playwright of the absurd was Jean Genet (who combined absurdism and diabolism);
some of the early dramatic works of the Englishman Harold Pinter and the
American Edward Albee are written in a similar mode. The early plays of Tom
Stoppard, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and Travesties
(1974), exploit the devices of Absurdist Theater more for comic than
philosophical ends.
Theatre of the
Absurd or Absurd Drama is a term used to characterize the work of a number of
European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early 1960s.A the term
suggests, the function of such theatre is to give a dramatic expression to the
philosophical notion of that 'absurd' a notion that had received widespread
diffusion following the publication of 'Camus's essay
Le Mythe de Sisyph in 1942.
2. Absurd - purposelessness and meaninglessness
To define the world as absurd is to recognize its fundamentally indecipherable nature. This recognition is associated with feelings of loss frequently, purposelessness, and bewilderment. To such feelings, the Theatre of the Absurd gives ample expression, often leaving the observer baffled in the face of disjointed meaningless or repetitious dialogues, incomprehensible behaviour, and plots that deny all notion of logical or 'realistic development. The recognition of the absurd nature of human existence provided dramatists with a source of comedy. The French author, Eugene Ionesco, author of The Bald Soprano (1949), and other plays in the theatre of the absurd has put it: "Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless Ionesco also said, in commenting on the mixture of moods in the literature of the absurd:" "People drowning in meaninglessness can only be grotesque, their sufferings can only appear tragic by derision".
3. Features of Absurd drama
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Absurd
drama represents the disorientation of living in an unfriendly and hostile
universe.
●
It
is a theatre of the situation as against a theatre of sequential events.
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The
action is an absurd drama that does not tell a story but presents a pattern of
images designed to reflect the perplexity of man's existence in an
incomprehensible world.
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There
is no plot or story in the traditional sense of such plays. They lack formal
logic and conventional structure.
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The
plays often depict the emptiness and nothingness of life.
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The
characters are depicted as being aimless and lost in a world that is beyond
their comprehension. They are usually flat characters.
●
The
dialogue is pointless and at times funny.
4. Absurd drama and the dramatists
Samuel Beckett,
the most eminent and influential Writer in the absurd drama was an Irishman living
in Paris who often wrote in French and then translated his works into English.
His plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, project the irrationalism,
helplessness, and absurdity to life in dramatic forms that reject realistic
settings, logical reasoning or coherently evolving plot. The other dramatists
who were active in the 1950s include Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet
and, Harold Pinter.
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