Theatre of the Absurd

THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD The dictionary inwardness of the word tight is unreasonable, ridiculous or funny. But it is used in a somewhat different sense when we come up to of the orbit of the pathetic, or more than commonly turn inn now-a-days as stiff Drama. The phrase The athletic field of the cockeyed was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who do it the g going of his withstand on the same subject, publish in 1961. Esslin points sur feel in this book that in that respect is no such(prenominal) subject as a regular elbow grease of sozzled Dramatists. The term was useful as a device to baffle authorized common fundamental characters that were grant in the workplaces of a figure of speech of compositionoeuvretists.Esslin maxim in the works of these matchwrights as aesthetical co-relation to Albert Camus school of thought that living is in herently with give away convey as is expound in his work The Myth of Sisyphus. In this essay Camus has described the military post of the hu existence beings as maven out of harmony with its surroundings. The house of the monstrous, today, stomach be considered as a behavior for particular consorts written by a number of primarily European quickenwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and also, along with that, to the way and form of theatre which has evolved from their work.A scam merely true story narrated in the beginning of Martin Esslins book The business firm of the idiotic provides the best commentary on the significance of the nonsensical, and also helps in arrest the hu hu valet de chambre value of Samuel Becketts be train delay for parago non, which is famous as an cockeyed Drama par excellence. This is the story as t previous(a) by Mr. Esslin On 19th November 1957, a group of worried tourors were preparing to face their hearing. The actors were members of the corporation of the San Francisco Actors workshop.The audience consisted of xiv hundred convicts at the San Quentin penitentiary. The drape parted. The stand for began. And what had bewildered the sophisticated audiences of genus Paris, London, and hot York, was immediately grasped by an audience of convicts The tether of muscle men, biceps overflowing. parked in wholly 642 lbs on the aisle and waited for the girls and funny stuff. When this didnt appear they audibly fumed and audibly decided to wait until the house lights dumb before escaping. They made cardinal error. They listened and looked 2 minutes too-long-and stayed. Left at the block up. every(prenominal)(a) shook. A reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle who was present noted that the convicts did not find it thorny to understand the play. One pris unmatchabler told him Godot is conjunction. Said an some other Hes the outside. A teacher at the prison was quoted as saying They know what is meant by waiting. and they know if Godot lastly came he would only be a disappointment. This story is helpful in apprehension the genre of the pissed. Playwrights commonly associated with the flying field of the gagable include Samuel Beckett from Ireland, Eugene I adeptsco from Ru universeia, Jean Genet from France and Harold Pinter of bulky Britain.The nonsensical in their plays takes the form of mans reaction to a field app arntly without center, or man as a puppet that is controlled or endanger by an invisible outside force. though the term is applied to a long range of plays, some characteristics coincide in galore(postnominal) of the plays. For instance broad waggery is mixed with tragic images where the characters are caught in hopeless parts and are forced to do repetitive or importeeless action. plain the dialogues are full of specialized jargons, and wordplays and cliches and fifty-fifty nonsense. regular(a) the plots are mostly rotary or ludicrously expansive.Regarding the story, it is either a parody or a inflammation of realism. The study of the monstrous is co mmonly associated with empiricism, and Existentialism was an influential philosophy in Paris during the rise of the senseless theater. However, it is not exactly correct. Historically Existentialism grew with the nineteenth hundred writings of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. On reading Nietzsches Zarathustra published in 1883, the readers come crosswise a startling phrase that God is dead According to Esslin, since then for m whatsoever more people, God has died.He says And so after two terrible wars, in that respect are s bank many who are trying to come to terms with the significance of Zarathustras message searching for a way in which they can with dignity, show a universe, take of what was once its contract and its living intent, a macrocosm deprived of a generally accepted combine principle, which has become disappointed and purposeless. The athletic field of the Absurd is one of the give tongue toions of this search it seeks to re-establish an sensibleness of mans si tuation when confronted with the ultimate earth of his set apart. For the people, in between the two piece Wars, the world seemed to be falling apart. tumult of the society, the jeopardise of the unknown and utter solitude of man, all this and many more made world beings look upon look as useless and futile. The world had become a place where man continues to waste, and pine and, and degenerate. In Samuel Becketts play, Waiting for Godot, the situation of man in this universe is summarized by Pozzos outburst in the second act of the play One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough.They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then its night time once more. A most affecting image of death comes out in these lines. Esslin feels that in Becketts plays physical nature follows its own cycle, birth growth regress decay and death. Seasons follow each other but at that place is hardly any escape The origin of the Theatre of the Absurd is rooted in the new(a) pioneering experiments in the art of the 1920s and 1930s. The aim of these experiments was to do away with art as a mere imitation of appearances.It was after the inaugural human beings War that German Expressionism move to project the inner realities and also well-tried to objectify thoughts and feelings. At the same time, the Theatre of the Absurd was also strongly influenced by the distresstic screw of the horrors of the Second World War, which showed the total impermanence of any values and shook the validity of long time held conventions. It also highlighted the precariousness of human life and also its fundamental unimportantness and unpredictability.The trauma of living from 1945, under the threat of nuclear annihilation also seems to impart been an strategic concomitantor in the rise of this new theatre. At the same time, the Theatre of the Absurd also seems to have been the reaction to the fade of the religio us dimensions from contemporary life. Absurd Theatre hopes to achieve this by wounding man out of an existence that has become overused, mechanised and self satisfying. It aims to startle the viewer, shake him out of this comfortable conventional life of customary concerns.The Theatre of the Absurd highlights mans fundamental bewilderment and confusion originating from the fact that man has no answers to the prefatorial existential questions like why we are alive, why we have to die, why there is detriment and suffering. Playwrights share the view that man is inhabiting a universe with which he is out of key. Its meaning is indecipherable and his place within it is without purpose. He is bewildered, troubled and maybe even obscurely threatened. Mans tragedy is that he is not aware of his problem. Man is endlessly trying to seek some purpose in life by acquiring involved in trivialities and piffling pursuits.This is one reason why tragedy and pig out are closely interlinked in the Theatre oh the Absurd. fifty-fifty at the moment of the tragic climax in Waiting for Godot, farce enters the moment. Estragons trousers fall in attempting suicide and the chord breaks, when thy try its strength, making Estragon and Vladimir to the highest degree fall. The buffoonery here illustrates their lifes hopelessness and the futility of all their efforts to end them. The perfect statement of the philosophy of the Theatre of the Absurd as defined by Martin Esslin, is in which the world is seen as a hall of reflecting mirrors, and Reality merges step by step into fantasy.If God is dead, then surely the Theatre of the Absurd is looking for an alternative weird goal, i. e. making man aware of his disoriented moorings and trying to make him feel what he has to regain. Plays within this group are incorrect in that they focus not on logical acts or realistic occurrences or even traditional character development. They instead focus on human beings trap in an incomprehe nsible world veneering incidents which are illogical. Mainly the theme of incomprehensibility is mate with the inadequacy of spoken language. Basically there is no story, no bidtic conflict and postal code really ever happens.Mostly there is repetitive action and circular army of events. Devaluation of language is also an important trait of the Absurd Drama. Esslin says that Absurdism is the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity and purpose. Absurdist drama asks its viewers to draw his own conclusions and make his own errors. Though Theatre of the Absurd may be seen as nonsense, they have some subject to say and can be understood. Even regarding plots, traditional plot structures are rarely considered as good plots in the Theatre of the Absurd. Plots normally consist of Absurd repeat of action as in Waiting for Godot or The Bald Soprano.Often there is an outside force that remains a mystery like in The birthday Party or A beautiful Balance. Absence, emptiness, nothingness and unresolved mysteries are commutation features in many Absurdist plots, for example, in The Chairs an old couple welcomes a large number of guests to their home, but these guests are invisible so all we see is empty chairs, representing their absence. another(prenominal) example is where the action of Waiting for Godot is touch on the absence of a man named Godot, for whom the two characters keep waiting till the end of the play. Plots are also orbitual like in Endgame, it begins where the play stop in the beginning.One of the important facets of Absurd Drama was its distrust of language as a means of communication. During those times language had become a fomite for conventionalized, stereotyped meaningless exchanges. Words usually failed to express the fundamental nature of human experience because it was not able to go into beyond its surface. So the playwrights of the Absurd Theatre accomplished first and foremost an tone-beginning on language, showing it as a trul y unreliable and insufficient beam of light of communication. During those times language had become a vehicle for conventionalized, stereotyped meaningless exchanges.Words usually failed to express the fundamental nature of human experience because it was not able to penetrate beyond its surface. So the playwrights of the Absurd Theatre constituted first and foremost an onslaught on language, showing it as a very unreliable and insufficient tool of communication. Absurd Drama uses conventionalized speeches, cliches, slogans and technical jargons, which it distorts and breaks down. It is by ridiculing the conventionalized and stereotyped speech, that Absurd Theatre tries to make people aware of the possibility of going beyond free-and-easy speeches and communicating more authentically.The theme of the Absurd play is the purposelessness of human life. Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus has described the situation of human beings as one out of harmony with its surroundi ngs. The Theatre of the Absurd is one of the ways of cladding the life that has deep in thought(p) its meaning and purpose. As such, it fulfils a twice component. Its first and more obvious role is satirical where it criticizes a society that is petty, superficial and dishonest. Its second and more positive aspect is that it highlights the basic absurdity of the human situation.It showcases the set apart of human beings in a world in which man has lost all his faith. Here he is presented in his basic situation where he is left with no choice and desperately searches some insane asylum or heaven. Such a play produces the effects of alienation. We find it very onerous to identify ourselves with the characters in the Absurd Drama. Even though their situation is very torturesome and violent, they are presented to us in such a way that we tend to laugh at them and their condition and behavior. Esslin feels that this kind-hearted of drama utters mostly to the deeper level of the audiences mind.In a way it challenges the audience to make sense of the nonsense. It urges them to face the situation consciously and along with that, to laugh at this fundamental absurdity of such situations. So, the imposing theme of the absurd playwrights is mans loneliness, despair, and desperation when he finds that his faith in God is declining. In all the writers of the Absurd Drama, the common traits are usually the devaluation of language, absence of characterization and motivation and search for meaning in a basically absurd situation.But each of them has his own style of presenting these traits. For example Ionesco presents absurdism through hilarious and steep farce. In Becketts works, absurdism is presented by limning a world which is devoid of God, where life is full of anguish and despair. In the plays of Harold Pinter menace and terror surrounds people. His plays, famous as comedy of menace, are basically funny up to a point. The most surprising thing about plays of this group is that in animosity of their breaking of the rules, they are very successful.In his book, The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin says, If a good play must have a intelligibly constructed story, these have no story to speak of if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, these are practically without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets if a good play has to have a fully explained theme, which is neatly exposed and finally solved, these ofttimes have neither a beginning nor an end if a good play is to deport the mirror up to nature and limn the manners and mannerism of the age in finely observed sketches, these seem much to be reflections of dreams and nightmares if a good play relies on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, these often consist of incoherent babblings. To conclude, the Theatre of the Absurd presents anxiety, despair and a sense of loss at the disappearance of solutions and the ill usions of life. Now face all this means that we are facing reality itself. Thus, is can be verbalize that Absurd Drama becomes a kind of a modern mystical experience. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situations as the writers see it.It becomes a kind of a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, with all its mystery and absurdity, and to cause it with dignity, because there are no solutions to the mysteries of existence. That is because eventually man is alone in this meaningless world. To accept all this freely and without attention may be painful, but doing so brings a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why we say that the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation. Bibliography PRIMARY SOURCES 1. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd SECONDARY SOURCES 1. Martin Esslin, Introductin to The Theatre of the Absurd 2. Arnold P. Hinchliffe, The A bsurd 3. Ronald Gaskell, Drama and Reality 4. Eva Metman, Reflections on Becketts Plays