Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett • . Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was first performed on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, absurd /əbˈsəːd/ Learn to pronounce adjective 1. wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate. "the allegations are patently absurd" Definition of absurd : The state or condition in which human beings exist in an irrational and meaningless universe and in which human life has no ultimate meaning. Absurd Drama: Etymology[edit] Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "The Theatre of the Absurd".[2] He grouped these plays around the broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert Camus uses the term in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus.[3] The Absurd in these plays takes the form of man's reaction to a world apparently without meaning, or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. This style of writing was first popularized by the Eugène Ionesco play The Bald Soprano (1950). Although the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play". In his book Absurd Drama (1965), Esslin wrote: The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.[citation needed] Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, Luigi Pirandello, Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Miguel Mihura, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fernando Arrabal, Václav Havel, Edward Albee, Malay Roy Choudhury, Tadeusz Różewicz, Sławomir Mrożek, N.F. Simpson, and Badal Sarkar (Badal Sircar).[4] Origin of Absurd Drama: In the first edition of The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin saw the work of these playwrights as giving artistic meaning to Albert Camus's philosophy that life is inherently without meaning, as illustrated in his work The Myth of Sisyphus. In the first (1961) edition, Esslin presented the four defining playwrights of the movement as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet, and in subsequent editions he added a fifth playwright, Harold Pinter—although each of these writers has unique preoccupations and characteristics that go beyond the term "absurd."[5][6] Other writers associated with this group by Esslin and other critics include Tom Stoppard,[7] Friedrich Dürrenmatt,[8] Fernando Arrabal,[9] Edward Albee,[10] Boris Vian,[11] and Jean Tardieu.[5][6][9] Significant precursors Though the label "Theatre of the Absurd" covers a wide variety of playwrights with differing styles, they do have some common stylistic precursors (Esslin [1961]). These precursors include Elizabethan tragicomedy, formal experimentation, pataphysics, surrealism, Dadaism, and most importantly existentialism. Elizabethan – tragicomedy] The mode of most "absurdist" plays is tragicomedy.[12][13] As Nell says in Endgame, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness … it's the most comical thing in the world".[14] Esslin cites William Shakespeare as an influence on this aspect of the "Absurd drama."[15] Shakespeare's influence is acknowledged directly in the titles of Ionesco's Macbett and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Friedrich Dürrenmatt says in his essay "Problems of the Theatre", "Comedy alone is suitable for us … But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already really comedies out of which the tragic arises."[16] Though layered with a significant amount of tragedy, the Theatre of the Absurd echoes other great forms of comedic performance, according to Esslin, from Commedia dell'arte to vaudeville.[12][17] Similarly, Esslin cites early film comedians and music hall artists such as Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops and Buster Keaton as direct influences. (Keaton even starred in Beckett's Film in 1965.)[18] Formal experimentation of Absurd Drama: As an experimental form of theatre, many Theatre of the Absurd playwrights employ techniques borrowed from earlier innovators. Writers and techniques frequently mentioned in relation to the Theatre of the Absurd include the 19th-century nonsense poets, such as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear;[19] Polish playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz;[20] the Russians Daniil Kharms,[21] Nikolai Erdman,[22] and others; Bertolt Brecht's distancing techniques in his "Epic theatre";[23] and the "dream plays" of August Strindberg.[5][24] One commonly cited precursor is Luigi Pirandello, especially Six Characters in Search of an Author.[24][25] Pirandello was a highly regarded theatrical experimentalist who wanted to bring down the fourth wall presupposed by the realism of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen. According to W. B. Worthen, Six Characters and other Pirandello plays use "Metatheatre— roleplaying, plays-within-plays, and a flexible sense of the limits of stage and illusion—to examine a highly-theatricalized vision of identity".[26] Another influential playwright was Guillaume Apollinaire whose The Breasts of Tiresias was the first work to be called "surreal".[27][28][29] Pataphysics, surrealism, and Dadaism] One of the most significant common precursors is Alfred Jarry whose wild, irreverent, and lascivious Ubu plays scandalized Paris in the 1890s. Likewise, the concept of 'pataphysics— "the science of imaginary solutions"—first presented in Jarry's Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician)[30] was inspirational to many later Absurdists,[28] some of whom joined the Collège de 'pataphysique, founded in honor of Jarry in 1948[27][31] (Ionesco,[32] Arrabal, and Vian[32][33] were given the title Transcendent Satrape of the Collège de 'pataphysique). The Theatre Alfred Jarry, founded by Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac, housed several Absurdist plays, including ones by Ionesco and Adamov.[34][35] Artaud's "The Theatre of Cruelty" (presented in The Theatre and Its Double) was a particularly important philosophical treatise. Artaud claimed theatre's reliance on literature was inadequate and that the true power of theatre was in its visceral impact.[36][37][38] Artaud was a Surrealist, and many other members of the Surrealist group were significant influences on the Absurdists.[39][40][41] Absurdism is also frequently compared to Surrealism's predecessor, Dadaism (for example, the Dadaist plays by Tristan Tzara performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich).[42] Many of the Absurdists had direct connections with the Dadaists and Surrealists. Ionesco,[43][44] Adamov,[45][46] and Arrabal[47] for example, were friends with Surrealists still living in Paris at the time including Paul Eluard and André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, and Beckett translated many Surrealist poems by Breton and others from French into English.[48][49] Relationship with existentialism Many of the Absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical spokesman for existentialism in Paris, but few Absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own existentialist philosophy, as expressed in Being and Nothingness, and many of the Absurdists had a complicated relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet's plays, stating that for Genet, "Good is only an illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good".[50] Ionesco, however, hated Sartre bitterly.[51] Ionesco accused Sartre of supporting Communism but ignoring the atrocities committed by Communists; he wrote Rhinoceros as a criticism of blind conformity, whether it be to Nazism or Communism; at the end of the play, one man remains on Earth resisting transformation into a rhinoceros[52][53] Sartre criticized Rhinoceros by questioning: "Why is there one man who resists? At least we could learn why, but no, we learn not even that. He resists because he is there".[54][55] Sartre's criticism highlights a primary difference between the Theatre of the Absurd and existentialism: the Theatre of the Absurd shows the failure of man without recommending a solution.[56] In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy, comparing the Absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, "It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and yourself started out less from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought out these themes, you expressed them in a far more vital contemporary fashion". Ionesco replied, "I have the feeling that these writers – who are serious and important – were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language.