Movements
Theatre of the Absurd
Also Known As Absurdist Theatre
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A post-Second World War dramatic movement in which logical structure, causality and conventional dialogue dissolve, dramatizing a world in which human existence lacks inherent meaning or purpose and communication itself breaks down. The critic Martin Esslin named the movement in his 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd, grouping together playwrights including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov and Jean Genet who had not considered themselves a school before his study. Esslin's book has been called the most influential theatrical text of the 1960s.
Facts
Disputed
Period, From (Year)Martin Esslin's own 1961 study, which named the movement, treats Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) as an early landmark and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953) as its most influential work; because Esslin grouped independently written plays under a single retrospective label rather than describing a self-declared movement, no single founding date is universally accepted. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated Authors
Considered by critic Martin Esslin, who coined the term, to be a key figure of the Theatre of the Absurd; Waiting for Godot (1952) is among the movement's most influential plays.
Held Differently
Absurdist Fiction, Genres A different facet of the same territory, not a rejection: Absurdist Fiction is the broader prose-and-drama genre; Theatre of the Absurd names the mid-20th-century dramatists working the mode specifically on stage.
Associated With
Sources
1. Theatre of the Absurd (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)lead sectionQuote, lead section
The theatre of the absurd (French: théâtre de l'absurde) is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s.
Martin Esslin (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)on coining the termQuote, on coining the term
known for coining the term 'theatre of the absurd' in his 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd
Samuel Beckett (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Associated Authors: Samuel Beckett, Middle period section, Theatre of the AbsurdQuote, Associated Authors: Samuel Beckett, Middle period section, Theatre of the Absurd
Beckett is considered to be one of the last modernist writers and a key figure in what Martin Esslin called the 'Theatre of the Absurd.'
Absurdist Fiction (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Absurdist FictionQuote, Associated With: Absurdist Fiction
Absurdism as a philosophical movement is an extension of, or divergence from, Existentialism, which focuses on the pointlessness of mankind.
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