The Theatre of the Absurd

Summarised and adapted from: Esslin, M. (1968) The Theatre of the Absurd London: Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Absurdism is one of the most exciting and creative movements in the modern theatre. It is a term
applied to a particular kind of drama growing out of the philosophy of Existentialism and flourishing
in Europe and America in the 1950s and 1960s. It offers its audience an existentialist point of view
of the outside world and forces them to consider the meaning of their existence in a world where
there appears to be no true order or meaning. This movement emerged in France after World War
II, as a rebellion against the traditional values and beliefs of Western culture and literature. It began
with existentialist writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and eventually included others
writers such as Eugène Ionesco, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Edward Albee, and
Harold Pinter.

The tradition of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a return to old, even archaic traditions. Its novelty lies in its
somewhat unusual combination of such antecedents. The age-old traditions that the Theatre of the
Absurd displays in new and individually varied combinations might be classed under the headings
of:
a- “Pure” theatre, i.e. abstract scenic effects as they are familiar in the circus or revue, in the work
of jugglers, acrobats, bull- fighters or mimes.
b- Clowning, fooling and mad scenes.
c- Verbal nonsense.
d- The literature of dream and fantasy, which often has a strong allegorical component.
These headings often overlap but the distinctions between them serve to isolate the
different strands of development.

a- The element of “pure”, abstract theatre in the Theatre of the Absurd is an aspect of its anti-
literary attitude, its turning away from language as an instrument for the expression of the deepest
levels of meaning. There has always been a close relationship between the performers of wordless
skills – jugglers, acrobats, tightrope walkers, aerialists and animal trainers – and the clown. This is
a powerful and deep secondary tradition of the theatre, from which the legitimate stage has drawn
new strength and vitality. It is the tradition of the mimus, or mime, of antiquity, a form of popular
theatre that coexisted with classical tragedy and comedy and was often far more popular and
influential. The mimus was a spectacle containing dancing, singing and juggling, but based largely
on the broadly realistic representation of character types in semi-improvised spontaneous
clowning. In the mime play of antiquity, the clown appears as the moros or stupidus, his absurd
behaviour arising from his inability to understand the simplest logical relations.
Little of the mimus has been preserved, as most of his plays were improvised and even
those that were written down were not considered respectable enough to be copied and handed
down. If their spirit lived on, it did so in the anti-literary, improvised folk theatre. This stream was
kept alive throughout the Middle Ages – while the schoolmen copied the comedies of Terence and
Plautus – by itinerant ioculatores and clowns. Their clowning and fooling reappear in the comic
characters, often as Devils and personified vices.
Another descendant of the mimus of the antiquity was the court jester. And both clowns and
court jesters appear in the comic characters of Shakespeare’s theatre (inverted logical reasoning,
false syllogism, free association, and the poetry of real or feigned madness). There is also in
Shakespeare the personification of the subconscious part of man, and, above all, a very strong
sense of the futility and absurdity of the human condition.

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b- The tradition of spontaneous drama outside the realm of literature continued and flourished in
Italy in the commedia dell’arte. Many of the traditional verbal and non-verbal gags of the commedia
dell’arte bear a close family resemblance to those of the mimus. The appeal of the commedia
dell’arte was so strong that it survived into the present, developing as the harlequinade in England.
The harlequinade forms the basis of the later English pantomime, which in a somewhat modified
shape, continues to these days as an irrepressible form of truly vulgar folk-theatre. Other elements
of the harlequinade merged into the tradition of the English music hall and American vaudeville,
with its cross-talk comedians, tap-dancers and comic songs.
The tradition of the commedia dell’arte reappears in a number of other guises. Its
characters have survived in the puppet theatre and the Punch and Judy shows, which also, in their
way, have influenced the writers of the Theatre of the Absurd.
The silent film comedy is without doubt one of the decisive influences on the Theatre of the
Absurd. It has the dream-like strangeness of a world seen from outside with the uncomprehending
eyes of one cut off from reality. It has the quality of nightmare and displays a world in constant and
wholly purposeless movement. And it repeatedly demonstrates the deep poetic power of wordless
and purposeless action. The great performers of this cinema, Chaplin and Buster Keaton, are the
perfect embodiment of the stoicism of man when faced with a world of mechanical devices that
have got out of hand.

c- The literature of verbal nonsense has greatly contributed to the peculiar quality of the Theatre
of the Absurd. Nonsense rhymes have been sung to children and chanted by adults since the
earliest times. There is a magic about nonsense, and magic formulae often consist of syllables that
still have rhyme or rhythm but have lost any sense they may originally have contained. Verbal
nonsense is in the truest sense a metaphysical endeavour, a striving to enlarge and to transcend
the limits of the material universe and its logic. The greatest masters of English nonsense are
Edward Lear (limericks) and Lewis Carroll.
Most nonsense verse and prose achieve their liberating effect by expanding the limits of
sense and opening up vistas of freedom from logic and cramping convention. There is, however,
another kind of nonsense, which relies on a contraction rather than on an expansion of the scope
of language. This procedure, much used in the Theatre of the Absurd, rests on the satirical and
destructive use of cliché – the fossilised débris of dead language.

d- Equally basic among the age-old traditions present in the Theatre of the Absurd is the use of
mythical, allegorical and dreamlike modes of thought – the projection into concrete terms of
psychological realities. For there is a close connection between myth and dream; myths have been
called the collective dreams of mankind.
The literature of dreams has always been strongly linked with allegorical elements; after all,
symbolic thought is one of the characteristics of dreaming. Piers Plowman, Dante’s Divine
Comedy, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and William Blake’s prophetic visions are essentially
allegorical dreams. With the decline of the fashion for allegory, the element of fantasy begins to
dominate – in such satirical fantasies as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or in Gothic novels like Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto.
The first to put on the stage a dream world in the spirit of modern psychological thinking
was August Strindberg, in whose plays the shift from the objective reality of the world of outside,
surface appearance to the subjective reality of inner states of consciousness is finally and
triumphantly accomplished.
James Joyce, in his Dublin stories, tried to capture the surface of the real world, until he
decided that he wanted to record an even more total reality in Ulysses. Bloom’s dream of grandeur
and degradation, and Stephen’s dream of guilt are merged in swiftly changing scenes of grotesque
humour and heartbreaking anguish. Joyce´s Finnegans Wake also anticipates the Theatre of the
Absurd´s preoccupations with language, its attempt to penetrate to a deeper layer of the mind,
closer to the subconscious matrix of thought.
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 Writers like Dostoievsky, Strindberg and Joyce discovered the universal, collective
significance of their own private obsessions. This is also true of Franz Kafka, whose impact on the
Theatre of the Absurd has been as powerful and direct as that of Joyce. The images of Kafka’s
own sense of loss of contact with reality, and his feelings of guilt at being unable to regain it have
become the supreme expression of the situation of modern man.
The Theatre of the Absurd is as much indebted to the collages of Picasso or Juan Gris and
the paintings of Klee (the titles of which are often little nonsense poems) as to the work of its
literary forebears. The Dada movement, which began in Zurich aimed at the destruction of art, or at
least the conventional art of the bourgeois era that had produced the horrors of war. The plays the
Dadaists produced and largely performed themselves are essentially nonsense poems in dialogue
form, accompanied by equally nonsensical business and decorated with bizarre masks and
costumes.
The German Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of plays that come extremely close to the
Theatre of the Absurd, both in their use of clowning and music-hall knockabout humour and in their
preoccupation with the problem of identity of the self and its fluidity. Brecht’s most enigmatic play,
and one of his greatest, was Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle of City). It deals not only with the
impossibility of knowing the motivation of human beings in their actions (thus anticipating the
technique of Pinter), it also presents the problem of communication between human beings, which
preoccupied Beckett, Admov, and Ionesco.

The significance of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd bravely faces up to the fact that for those to whom the world has lost its
central explanation and meaning, it is no longer possible to accept art forms still based on the
continuation of standards and concepts that have lost their validity; that is, the possiblility of
knowing the laws of conduct and ultimate values, as deducible from a firm foundation of revealed
certainty about the purpose of man in the universe.
In expressing the tragic sense of loss at the disappearance of ultimate certainties, the Theatre of
the Absurd, by a strange paradox, is also a symptom of what probably comes nearest to being a
genuine religious quest in our age: an effort to make man aware of the ultimate realities of his
condition, of his precarious and mysterious position in the universe.
Concerned as it is with the ultimate realities of the human condition, the relatively few fundamental
problems of life and death, isolation and communication, it represents a return to the original,
religious function of the theatre – the confrontation of man with the spheres of myth and religious
reality. The difference is merely that in ancient Greek tragedy the ultimate realities concerned were
generally known and universally accepted metaphysical systems, while the Theatre of the Absurd
expresses the absence of such generally accepted cosmic system of values. It makes no pretence
at explaining the ways of God to man. It can merely present an individual human being’s intuition of
the ultimate realities as he experiences them; the fruits of one man’s descent into the depths of his
personality, his dreams, fantasies, and nightmares.
While former attempts at confronting man with the ultimate realities of his condition projected a
coherent and generally recognised version of the truth, the Theatre of the Absurd merely
communicates one poet’s most intimate and personal intuition of the human situation, his own
sense of being, his individual vision of the world. This is the subject matter of the Theatre of the
Absurd, and it determines its form, which must represent a convention of the stage basically
different from the “realistic” theatre of our time. It is not concerned with the representation of
events, the narration of the fate or the adventures of characters, but instead with the presentation
of one individual’s basic situation. It is a theatre of situation against a theatre of events in
sequence, and therefore it uses a language based on patterns of concrete images rather than
argument and discursive speech. And since it is trying to present a sense of being, it can neither
investigate nor solve the problems of conduct of morals.
Because the Theatre of the Absurd projects its author’s personal world, it lacks objectively valid
characters. It cannot show the clash of opposing temperaments or study human passions locked in

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conflict, and is therefore not dramatic in the accepted sense of the term. Nor is it concerned with
telling a story to communicate some moral or social lesson. Its main aim is to communicate a
pattern of poetic images. The poetic image, with its ambiguity and its simultaneous evocation of
multiple elements of sense association, is one of the methods by which we can, however
imperfectly, communicate the reality of our intuition in the world.
The theatre of the Absurd abandons psychology, subtlety of characterisation, and plot in the
conventional sense. By doing this it gives the poetical element an incomparably greater emphasis.
The formal structure of a play is merely a device to express a complex total image by unfolding it in
a sequence of interacting elements.

Characteristics
a- Plot
Incidents do not tell a connected story, there is often no real story, instead there is a series of “free
floating images” which influence the way in which an audience interprets a play. Even though we
can talk of a lack of plot, the Theatre of the Absurd has something to say and can be understood.
There is a focus on the incomprehensibility of the world, or an attempt to rationalise an irrational,
disorderly world.
The main themes in the plays are: life and death; isolation; incommunication; the confrontation of
man with the spheres of myth and religious reality; man’s precarious and mysterious position in the
universe; the search of the self.
b- Characters
Characters lack motivation. They struggle to find order and purpose in irrational and
incomprehensible situations. They are presented to the audience as almost mechanical puppets,
clown-like characters and appear to the spectator inevitably comic. They are comic in spite of the
sombre subject matter, the violence and the bitterness. That is why the Theatre of the Absurd
transcends the categories of comedy and tragedy and combines laughter with horror.

c- Action
The whole of the action is mysterious, unmotivated, and at first sight nonsensical, but the stage
supplies the spectator with a number of disjoint clues that he has to fit into a meaningful pattern. In
this manner, he is forced to make a creative effort of his own, an effort at interpretation and
integration.

d- Structure
The audience is confronted with actions that lack apparent motivation, characters that are in
constant flux, and often happenings that are clearly outside the realm of rational experience. The
relevant question is not What is going to happen next? but What is happening? What does the
action of the play represent? The spectator is challenged to formulate the questions that he will
have to ask if he wants to approach the meaning of the play.
Many of the plays have a circular structure, ending exactly as they began; others progress merely
by a growing intensification of the initial situation. There is no climax or moral. The spectators’
suspense consists in waiting for the gradual completion of this pattern which will enable him to see
the image as a whole. And only when that image is assembled – after the final curtain – can he
begin to explore, not so much its meaning as its structure, texture and impact.

e- Stage and language

The stage is a multidimensional medium that allows the simultaneous use of visual elements,
movements, light and language. It is therefore particularly suited to the communication of complex
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images which regain the freedom of using language as a mere component, sometimes
determinant, sometimes submerged in this multidimensional poetic imagery. By putting the
language of a scene in contrast to the actions, by reducing it to a meaningless pattern, or by
abandoning discursive logic for the poetic logic of association or assonance, the Theatre of the
Absurd has opened up a new dimension of the stage. In its devaluation of language it is in tune
with the trend of our time: large areas of meaningful experience now belong to non-verbal
languages, the mass media’s use of superlatives, euphemisms and circumlocutions has turned
words meaningless, and language appears more and more as being in contradiction to reality
The language of the Theatre of the Absurd is cryptic; it acts as a barrier to communication, which in
turn isolates the individual even more, thus making speech almost futile. Communication is a mere
time-filling device that leads to no action. The element of language still plays an important part, but
what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters.

Theatre of the Absurd: contrast with traditional drama

The plays belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd are part of a different stage convention which is
the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time.
Plays written in this new convention are often compared and judged with the criteria of traditional
stage conventions; that is why they are sometimes labelled anti-plays.

TRADITIONAL DRAMA THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

It follows a pattern: beginning,
NO development of plot.
development and end (dénouement)
STRUCTURE
There is a climax.
NO climax.

Chronological order.
Sometimes circular action.

The theme is clearly stated, fully
The theme and time not clearly
explained, neatly exposed and finally stated. Neither beginning nor end.
THEME solved.

Abstract, metaphysical, above

Portrays the manners and everyday experience (Reflections of
mannerisms of the age. dreams and nightmares.)

Normal human beings.
Clown-like, puppets characters.
Sometimes they are symbols,
CHARACTERS
They are true to life. We are told
abstractions. Sometimes they do not
about their past, etc.
even know their names, they are not

Acceptably depicted. sure of their identity, they are in the
search of the self.

Realistic.
Unrealistic.
SETTING

Actual scenery representing a
No setting. Symbols are used to
characteristic place and time. Details show time passes.
are provided.

Concrete, logical, fine speeches.
Debased. Incoherent babbling.

Witty sayings, repartee. Replaced by gestures, paralinguistic
signals.
LANGUAGE
Brilliant dialogues.

Oblique dialogues: people do not
listen to others (incommunication)

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