prof. dr. fernando de toro martin esslin the theatre of the absurd (1961) english 4.130

Prof. Dr. Fernando de Toro

Martin EsslinThe Theatre of the Absurd (1961)

English 4.130

Samuel Beckett

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd

Absurdity and the Absurd

The Tradition of the Absurd

The Significance of The Absurd


I. Introduction: The Absurdity and the Absurd

On 19 November 1957, a group of worried actors were preparing to face their audience. The actors were members of the company of the San Francisco Actors' Workshop. (1)

The audience consisted of fourteen hundred convicts at the San Quentin penitentiary. No live play had been performed at San Quentin since Sarah Bernhardt appeared there in 1913. (1)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd The leading article of the prison paper showed how

clearly the writer had understood the meaning of the play:

It was an expression, symbolic in order to avoid all personal error, by an author who expected each member of his audience to draw his own conclusions, make his own errors. It asked nothing in point, it forced no dramatized moral on the viewer, it held out no specific hope. . . . We're still waiting for Godot, and shall continue to wait. When the scenery gets too drab and the action too slow, we'll call each other names and swear to part forever—but then, there's no place to go!‘ (2)

Why did a play of the supposedly esoteric avant-garde make so immediate and so deep an impact on an audience of convicts? (3)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd Because it confronted them with a situation in some

ways analogous to their own? Perhaps. (3)

Or perhaps because they were unsophisticated enough to come to the theatre without any preconceived notions and ready-made expectations, so that they avoided the mistake that trapped so many established critics who condemned the play for its lack of plot, development, characterization, suspense, or plain common sense. (3)

The reception of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin, and the wide acclaim given to plays by Ionesco, Adamov, Pinter, and others, testify that these plays, which are so often superciliously dismissed as nonsense or mystification, have some-thing to say and can be understood. (3)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdMost of the incomprehension with which plays of this

type are still being received by critics and theatrical reviewers, most of the bewilderment they have caused and to which they still give rise, come from the fact that they are [were] part of a new, and still developing stage convention that has not yet been generally understood and has hardly ever been defined. (3)

Inevitably, plays written in this new convention will, when judged by the standards and criteria of another, be regarded as impertinent and outrageous impostures. (3)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdIf a good play must have a cleverly constructed story,

these have no story or plot to speak of;

If a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, these are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets;

If a good play to have a fully explained theme, which is neatly exposed and rally solved, these often have neither a beginning nor an end. (4)

They can be judged only by the standards of the Theatre of the Absurd […]. (4)


It must be stressed, -however, that the dramatists whose work is here discussed do not form part of any self-proclaimed or self-conscious school or movement. (4)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdIf they also, very clearly and in spite of

themselves, have a good deal in common, it is because their work most sensitively mirrors and reflects the preoccupations and anxieties, the emotions and thinking of many of their contemporaries in the Western world. (4)

The Theatre of the Absurd, however, can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time. (4)

The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitution of religions of progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. (5)


By 1942, Albert Camus was calmly putting the question why, since life had, lost all meaning, man should not seek escape in suicide.

Quote SisyphusIn one of the great, seminal heart-

searchings of our time, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tried to diagnose the human situation in a world of shattered beliefs:

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdA world that can be explained by reasoning,

however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. He is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor of his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity. (5)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdIn an essay on Kafka, Ionesco defined his

understanding of the Absurd as follows:Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose …

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost: all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless. (5)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdThis sense of metaphysical anguish at

the absurdity of the human condition is the theme of the plays of Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet, and many other writers. (5)

The Theatre of the Absurd tries to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed (performativity). (6)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdIf Sartre argues that existence comes before

essence and that human personality can be reduced to pure potentiality and the freedom to choose itself anew at any moment, he presents his ideas in plays based on brilliantly drawn characters who remain wholly consistent and thus reflect the old convention that each human being ahs a core of immutable, unchanging essence – in fact, an immortal soul. (6)


The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being-that is, in terms of concrete stage images.

This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet. (6)

It is this striving for an integration between the subject-matter and the form in which is expressed that separates the Theatre of the Absurd from the Existentialist Theatre. (7)


The Theatre of the Absurd tends toward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. (7)

The Theatre of the Absurd is thus part of the ‘anti-literary’ movement of our time, which has found its expression in abstract painting, with its rejection of ‘literary’ elements in pictures. (7)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdII. 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, and a survey of these will show what may strike the unprepared spectator is iconoclastic and incomprehensible innovation is the fact mere1y an expansion, revaluation, and development of procedures that are familiar and completely acceptable in only slightly different contexts. 281

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdTheatre of the Absurd, wholly delightful and not in

the least obscure. It is only because habit and fossilized convention have so narrowed the public's expectation as to what constitutes theatre proper that attempts to widen its range meet with angry protests from those who have come to see a certain closely defined kind of entertainment and who lacks the spontaneity of mind to let a slightly different approach make its impact on them. (282)

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 of expression of the deepest levels of meaning. (282)


In Beckett and Ionesco we find a return to an earlier non-verbal forms of theatre. (282-283)

They have deep, often metaphysical meaning, and express more than language could. (283)

The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than that which the poet himself is able to put it into words and concepts. (283)


There has always been a close relationship between the performers of wordless skills —jugglers, acrobats, tightrope walkers aerialists, an animal trainers – and the clown.

This is a powerful and deep secondary tradition of the theatre, from which the legitimate stage has again and again drawn new strength and vitality.

It is the tradition of the mimus, or the mime, of antiquity, a form of popular theatre that coexisted with classical tragedy and comedy and was often far more popular an influential. (284)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdSuch grotesque characters appeared in the

mimus within a crudely realistic convention, but, characteristically, these plays, which were often half improvised, were not bound by any of the strict rules of the regular tragedy or comedy. (284)

Equally basic among the age-old traditions present in the Theatre of the Absurd is the use of mythical, allegorical dreamlike modes of thought —the projection into concrete terms of psychological realities. (301)

For there is a close connection between myth and dream; myth have been called the collective dream images of mankind. (301)


The world of myth has entirely ceased to be effective on a collective plane in most rationally organized Western societies. (301-302)

Theatre of the Absurd [is part of] the tradition of the iconoclasts: Jarry, Apollinaire, the Dadaists, some of the German Expressionists, the Surrealists, and the prophets of a wild, and ruthless theatre, like Artaud and Vitrac. (308)


The theatre should aim at expressing what language is incapable of putting into words. (335)

It is not a matter of suppressing speech in the theatre but of changing its role, and especially or reducing its position. (335)

Above all, it is the fact that for the first time this approach has met with a wide response from a broadly based public.


This is a characteristic not so much of the Theatre of the Absurd as of its epoch.

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd III. The Significance of the Absurd

When Nietzsche's Zarathustra descended from his mountains to preach to mankind, he met a saintly hermit in the forest. 350

This old man invited him to stay in the wilderness rather than go into the cities of men. 350

When Zarathustra asked the hermit how he passed his time in his solitude, he replied: I make up songs and sing them; and when I make up songs I laugh, I weep, and I growl; thus do I praise God. 350


Zarathustra declined the old man's offer and continued on his journey. 350

But when he was alone, he spoke thus to his heart:

Can it be possible! This old saint in the forest has not yet heard that God is dead! (350)


Zarathustra was first published in 1883. The number of people for whom God is dead has greatly increased since Nietzsche's day, and mankind has learn the bitter lesson of the falseness and evil nature of some of the cheap and vulgar substitutes that have been set up to take his place.


And so, after two terrible wars, there are still many who are trying to come to terms with the implications of Zarathustra’s message, searching for a way in which they can, with dignity, confront a universe deprived of what was once its centre and its living purpose, a world deprived of a generally accepted integrating principle, which has become disjointed, purposeless-absurd. (350)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdThe Theatre of the Absurd is one of the

expressions of this search. (350)

[…] that is the possibility of knowing the laws of conduct and ultimate values, as deductible from a firm foundation of revealed certainty about the purpose of man in the universe. (351)

at least in search of a dimension of the Ineffable; an effort to make man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, to still in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish, to shock him out of an existence that has become trite, mechanical, complacent, and deprived of the dignity and awareness. (351)


The Theatre of the Absurd forms part of the unceasing endeavor of the true artists of our time to breach this dead wall of complacency and automatism and to re-establish an awareness of man's situation when confronted with the ultimate reality of his condition. (351)

This is the feeling of the deadness and mechanical senselessness of half-unconscious lives, the feeling of ‘human beings secreting inhumanity’, which Camus describes in The Myth of Sisyphus: (351)


In certain hours of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their senseless pantomime, makes stupid everything around them. A man speaking on the telephone behind a glass partition—one cannot hear him but observes his trivial gesturing. One asks oneself, why is he alive? This malaise in front of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable letdown when faced with the image of what we are, this ‘nausea’, as a contemporary writer calls it, also is the Absurd. (Camus, The Absurd Reasoning, 11) (351-352)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdThat is why [we] always see man stripped

of the accidental circumstances of social position or historical context; (352)

confronted with the basic choices the basic situations of his existence: man faced with time and therefore waiting, in Beckett’s plays. (352)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdConcerned as it is with the ultimate realities of the

human condition, the relatively few fundamental problems of life and death, isolation and communication the Theatre of the Absurd, however grotesque, frivolous, and irreverent it may appear, represents a return to the original, religious function of the theatre—the confrontation of man with the spheres of myth and religious reality. (353)

Like ancient Greek tragedy and the medieval mystery plays and baroque allegories, the Theatre of the Absurd is intent on making its audience aware of man’s precarious and mysterious position in the universe.(353)


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. (353)

This is the subject-matter of the Theatre of the Absurd, and it determines its form, which must, of necessity, represent a convention of the stage basically different from the “realistic” theatre of our time. (353)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdAs the Theatre of the Absurd is not concerned with

conveying information or presenting the problems or destinies of characters that exist outside the author's inner world, as it does not expound a thesis or debate ideological propositions, 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. (354)

It is a theatre of situation as 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. (354)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdThe action in a play of the Theatre of the

Absurd is not intended to tell a story but to communicate a pattern of poetic images. (354)

To give but one example: things happen in Waiting for Godot, but these happenings do not constitute a plot or story; they are an image of Beckett's intuition that nothing really ever happens in man's existence. (354)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdTheatre of the Absurd has regained the

freedom of using language as merely one—sometimes dominant, sometimes submerged—component o its multidimensional poetic imagery. (356)

By putting the language of a scene in contrast to the action and reducing it to 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. (357)


In the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, the audience is confronted with characters whose motives and actions remain largely incomprehensible. (361)

With such characters it is almost impossible to identify; (361)

It presents the audience with a picture of a disintegrating world that has lost its unifying principle, its meaning and its purpose—an absurd universe. (361)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdThe relevant question here is not so much

what is going to happen next but, what is happening? 'What does the action of the play represent?' (367)

But the test of the truth of the play must lie ultimately in its ability to communicate the truth of the experience of the characters involved. (372)

Ultimately, a phenomenon like the Theatre of the Absurd does no reflect despair or a return to dark irrational forces but expresses modern man’s endeavour to come to terms with the world in which he lives. (377)


It attempts is to make him face up to the human condition as it really is, to free him from illusions that are bound to cause constant maladjustment and disappointment. (377)

For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear without illusions – and to laugh at it. (377)

Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the AbsurdThat is the cause to which, in their

various individual, modest, and quixotic ways, the dramatists of the Absurd are dedicated. (377)

prof. dr. fernando de toro martin esslin the theatre of the absurd (1961) english 4.130

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