The Lesson

In 1953, less than a year after its openings in Paris and London to perplexed and even angry audience members, a troupe of inmates at Lüttringhausen Prison in Germany translated and performed Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) for their fellow prisoners. They were so enthralled that one prisoner wrote Beckett to invite him to the show, later skipping bail and walking all the way to Paris to show up at the playwright’s doorstep. More famously, a troupe of professional actors performed Godot for 1,400 inmates at San Quentin in 1957 to the same delirious reaction. Why would prison inmates have such a strong, positive response to a play that audiences of seasoned and educated theatregoers had found confusing and unpleasant? Many even left after intermission; when upon returning for the second act, nothing had changed. Theatre critic Martin Esslin opens his book, The Theatre of the Absurd (1960), with the anecdote about San Quentin as an illustration of how the absurd is represented onstage. Life in prison is absurd. Prisoners are Sisyphus, having angered the gods and been sentenced to laboring each day in endless monotony into a stretch of time that feels like eternity. Like the characters in Waiting for Godot, the prisoners are waiting. There is no meaning in waiting or their daily work. When or if they get out, prison life will go on unchanged. This is the condition of the absurd made palpable through performance. Samuel Beckett, along with Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco are the major writers who Esslin identified as the first voices of the Theatre of the Absurd, a term that Esslin coined to describe a series of trends among playwrights that appeared on western stages within the ethos of a post-World War II world.

Unlike modernist movements, which were deliberate and structured, the Theatre of the Absurd was not a movement at all. Some playwrights, including Ionesco, resisted the absurdist label (or labels at all), but Esslin undeniably identified significant commonalities in thought and theatrical conventions among a growing number of plays that were shocking and baffling to audiences. Esslin explains, “‘Absurd’ originally means ‘out of harmony’ in a musical context. Hence its dictionary definition: ‘out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical’” (Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Overlock Press, 1973). This concept of the absurd describes the uncomfortable and unsettled feeling, or the incongruity of feeling the need to search for meaning while acknowledging that there is none. Theatre of the Absurd does not simply communicate the message of this absurdity or show characters coming to terms with it; it likewise creates the experience of absurdity for the audience. Of course, since this was not a conscious movement, these playwrights each had individual approaches and should also be considered separately, but Esslin provides an invaluable framework to analyze these plays and how they function. Absurdist theatre is influenced by modernist artists such as Antonin Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty, and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896). Additionally, absurdism has echoes of modernist movements such as Dadaism, which used nonsense and randomness to question notions of high art, and Surrealism, which created dream-like art to get to the truth of the unconscious mind. But contrary to modernism, absurdist playwrights rejected structures, rules, and manifestos. Any commonalities and cohesiveness as a movement resulted from a mixture of the way the playwrights influenced each other and their simultaneous and individual responses to the postmodern condition.

Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano is considered the founding work of Theatre of the Absurd, and it is perhaps the purest major example of absurdist conventions. It opens on what appears to be a normal domestic scene of a husband and wife at breakfast. Their dialogue borders on nonsensical—it seems “out of harmony,” and while it invites audiences to try to understand, the meaning and purpose are just out of reach. Since humans use language as a primary way to create meaning in the world, absurdist playwrights deliberately deconstruct and devalue language, and the action on stage typically contradicts the dialogue. Additionally, this distortion of language is used to destabilize other important signifiers (in both theatre and life): time, identity, and place become slippery concepts. The clock chimes the hour at random intervals. The couple invited for a dinner party are either married with a child or they have never met each other. A fireman stops by looking for fires. As the play progresses, the more audiences probe for meaning, the more meaningless it becomes. At the end, the play is cyclical. There is repetition. The two couples switch places, and the play begins again. Audiences who were used to realism and narrative plotlines walked out mid-performance, complaining that nothing happened. There is typically little or no action in absurdist plays, or the action is meaningless and serves no purpose. The plays pose questions that have no answers. Absurdist theatre was a symptom of postmodern thought and represents a profound shift in Western perspectives of the world.