Theater of the Absurd, term used to identify a body of plays written primarily in France from the mid-1940s through the 1950s. These works usually employ illogical situations, unconventional dialogue, and minimal plots to express the apparent absurdity of human existence. French thinkers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre used the term absurd in the 1940s in recognition of their inability to find any rational explanation for human life. The term described what they understood as the fundamentally meaningless situation of humans in a confusing, hostile, and indifferent world.
    British scholar Martin Esslin first used the phrase "theater of the absurd" in a 1961 critical study of several contemporary dramatists, including Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett and French playwrights Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. These writers reacted against traditional Western theatrical conventions, rejecting assumptions about logic, characterization, language, and plot. For example, Beckett's En attendant Godot (1953; translated as Waiting for Godot, 1954) portrays two tramps waiting for a character named Godot. They are not sure who Godot is, whether he will show up to meet them, and indeed whether he actually exists, but they spend each day waiting for him and trying to understand the world in which they live. Beckett often reduced character, plot, and dialogue to a minimum in an effort to highlight fundamental questions of human existence. Ionesco's La cantatrice chauve (1950; The Bald Soprano, 1956) portrays a group of characters who are incapable of true communication and who have no apparent purpose in their lives. The play has a circular structure, ending in the same way that it began.
    Precursors to the theater of the absurd can be found in a number of late 19th-century and early 20th-century writers and literary movements. Ubu roi (1896; translated 1951), by French playwright Alfred Jarry, is considered an early example of absurdist theater for its use of nonsense language and mocking of theatrical conventions. The early 20th-century artistic movement known as surrealism sought to employ the subconscious mind by creating works of art spontaneously, without conscious thought; the sometimes bizarre, disjointed, or illogical products of this process resemble absurdist theater. Other theatrical trends and movements that influenced the theater of the absurd or were incorporated into it include vaudeville and slapstick humor and the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. To a lesser extent, absurdist theater was influenced by the theoretical writings of Antonin Artaud in Le théâtre et son double (1938; The Theater and its Double, 1958), which called for a theater that would jolt audiences and thereby stir them to action.
    The first absurdist plays shocked audiences at their premieres, but their techniques are now common in avant-garde theater and in some mainstream works. Contemporary playwrights whose work shows the influence of the theater of the absurd include American dramatists Edward Albee and Sam Shepard, British dramatists Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, German dramatists Günter Grass and Peter Weiss, Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, and Czech dramatist Václav Havel.



"Theater of the Absurd," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 99. © 1993-1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.