1

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND, MEANING AND CHARACTERISTICS

During the second half of the Nineteenth century and the first half of the Twenteeth, man faced many challenges, which had been the cause behind the radical alterations in all aspects of life. These changes reformulated his view of himself and the world around him. Among these was the shock caused by the publication of Charles Darwins The Origin of Species (1859), a book that had deeply influenced modern society and thought. According to Darwin, man had probably sprung from a weak and gentle species, already living in society and more akin to the chimpanzee.1 Karl Marx, studying the evolution of societies, published his Critique of Political Economy, nearly at the same time, which analysed the development of cultures and societies solely on the basis of class interest, and attributes the modern sense of alienation to economic factors only. This led to the reduction of man to the level of an economic man, one whose community relationships were at the mercy of cashnexus, and whose psychological motivations were thought of

mostly in terms of self-interest.2 Moreover, the great achievement of Sigmund Freud in the field of psychology offered modern man a new way of thinking to solve his problems when he brought the psychological world of the subconscious mind to light and exposed some of its dark drives, hidden terrors and mysterious motivations.3 His books and theories began to attract the attention of a large group of people, including artists and writers. He gave them the chance to speak freely in their writing about topics that were previously considered taboos. Providing man with materialistic prosperity and wealth, these cultural developments in addition the scientific inventions and discoveries, worked negatively and indirectly to increase mans social and spiritual problems. It was a double-edged weapon. Man felt a deep sense of frustration and alienation being surrounded by a vast void in a variety of senses. Gradually the waning of religious as well as moral beliefs coupled with the spread of social and moral disintegration made man feel uneasy, and unsure whether there was any order, sense, or meaning in his existence or his old values. Man always used to return to religion to find answers and explanations for everything at facing any dilemma. But, since the days of Nitzsche (1844-1900), and his work Thus Spake Zarathustra (1842), the number of people for whom God is dead has greatly increased.4 So nothing remained as it was and modern man threw off the old beliefs, that shrouded5 him, and began a new continuous search for meaning. Mankind learned the hard lesson of the falsity and the bad nature of some of the cheap and vulgar substitutes that he has set up to take Gods place.6 And after two destructive wars, Martin Esslin said:

There are still many who are trying to come to terms with the implication of Zarathustras 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 disjoined purposelessabsurd.7 Thus, searching for a new and proper way to face a world that deprived man of any sense of satisfaction or hope, became the new mission of modern man. This ultimately created a general sense of the absurdity of existence and all its values. And of course, these feeling of anxiety, uncertainty, and bewilderment found their echoes in art and artists, like painters, poets, playwrights, as well as thinkers. Such figures were quick to respond to these alterations and sought to find the right means for presenting such turning points and their effects and explore mans position in his new world. But, these new changes in life and thinking needed new forms of expression. And it is no longer possible to accept art forms still based on the continuation of standards and concepts that have lost their validity.8 Actually one could call the Twenteeth century the age of isms.9 And the turmoil and confusion, the world was suffering from were reflected by the profusion of isms like Expressionism, Symbolism, Dadaism, Futurism, Absurdism, Surrealism, all of which shared one essential characteristic of their being anti-realists, or antirationalists. That is to say all these movements shared the rejection of all the old values and traditions.10 Furthermore, these movements were not based on the same ideologies though they shared the same formative elements that shaped these ideologies. The Twenteeth

century was an age of continuous changes. And there was no unified attitude towards this flux. So that artists were confronted with an infinite range of choice.11 Many styles rather than one uniform, or overall all form of response was the most characteristic feature of the 20th c. literary product. Thus, each saw the change from a different view point and: The most resourceful artists have always refused to become the prisoners of any one theory, Instead they have instinctively preserved their freedom of choice and have continuously searched for stimulating ideas wherever they may be found.12 So each individual approach or movement indicated the complete absence of any sense of belonging even, to a certain school of thought. This is the overall character of the modern age, since societies and individuals often showed very sensitive reactions to any weighty change or event. Thus, the aftermath of World War I brought about a sense of bitter disillusionment that gave birth to the nihilistic movement called dadaism.13 It was a protest, a challenge to traditional social values and a reaction against everything including the common forms of art.14 Moreover The Dadaists invented a form of theatre which included throwing things at the audience.15 It was a direct response to the moral horrors and material destruction caused by the war. Man found himself face to face with his terrible end death, as if the aim of all life is death,16 alone surrounded by blood and ruin. So the sense of loss, despair and hopelessness became general. Then it increased to be a prevalent sense of absurdity, everything turned to be absurd, purposeless, and meaningless, even human life. It was found worthless to continue

such a life. Thus, after World War II, which further stressed such reactions, the climate was really appropriate for the emergence of a new kind of literary approach including a theatre that was unique, shocking, and radical in its themes and techniques to reflect the overwhelmingly chaotic surroundings. These reactions did not appear in the form of a unified school or movement, but rather there were many individual approaches to these unpleasant realities that were reflected in the work of each individual writer. Suggestively, and because of sharing the cause of their emergence, these works had a number of common features and shared attitudes that let them be united under a single label. Martin Esslin suggested the term The Theatre of the Absurd, thus, stressing the sort of immediate reaction those plays gave, and describing specifically the works of a number of modern playwrights, among whom are Samuel Beckett, Eugne Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter and others. They generally shared the same interest in reflecting the state of modern man in his pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose to control its fate.17 Yet these writers were different in their stress on certain aspects of these interests. Moreover they reflected not only modern western mans problem, but their themes and characters, enjoy a basic sense of universality vage. May be that is the reason behind the popularity of plays like Waiting for Godot (1955), The Chairs (1951), The Balcony (1956) and others till the present time. The absurdists did not use one uniform style or theme. They differed from each other, and each writer, Esslin says: is an individual who regards himself as alone outsider, cut off and isolated in his private world. Each has his own personal approach to both

subject-matter and form; his own roots, sources, and background. If 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.18 Thus, each writer has his unique way to express the absurdity of modern life. In other words they were all preoccupied with reflecting the most obvious problems of human existence, namely, death, suffering of being, alienation, menace and incommunication. The word absurd was first used by Albert Camus (1913-1960) in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), to define the human situation of modern man as the condition of despair.19 This condition of despair that Camus described in his essay occurs at the point of consciousness of what is called the absurd, a point at which man felt the futility of his life. Camus in his essay, clearly, defined the human condition as essentially absurd:-

This absurdity, in Camus, is less a doctrine than an experience. It is a recognition of incompatibilities: between the intensity of physical life and the certainty of death; between mans insistent reasoning and the non-rational world he inhabits.20 In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus drew a picture of life in which Sisyphus represents a universal image of modern man. It represents the futility of life as a useless repetition of the same activities which are ultimately defeated by death. So The Myth of Sisyphus is intended to explain the human situation in a world of lost beliefs; in

a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger he lacks the hope of a promised land to come 21 Man is surrounded by a terrible chaos that leads to an overwhelming sense of loss. He is fated like Sisyphus, to repeat the same fruitless action, that makes up his absurd existence, which is empty of any actual sense, reason, or aim. Sisyphus in this essay is doomed to an everlasting toil of rolling a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have it rolling down again of its own weight and yet repeat the same unproductive action endlessly 22. Sisyphus is placed in an absurd state of existence in which everything is of equal value.23 And it is through consciousness of his situation that he becomes an absurd hero. This hero is neither good nor wicked, moral nor immoral, he is what Camus calls absurd.24 It is the same situation of Meursault, the hero of Camus novel The Stranger (1942), who is condemned to death because he has shot an Arab on the beach.25 Meursaults final consciousness of his condition shows the real absurdity of his word in which; Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others. And what difference could it make, since it all came to the same thing in the end 26 (italics mine) (The Stranger, pp. 118-19) Before it appeared on the stage, the idea of the absurd appeared in the works of non dramatic writers such as Franz Kafka (1882-1924). Camus in his essay Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka considers Kafka the ideal absurdist. Kafkas

novel, like The Trail (1952), and The Castle (1926) are full of descriptions of nightmares and obsessionsthe anxieties and guilt feelings of a sensitive human being lost in a world of convention and routine.27 Moreover, elements of the absurd appeared early in the Gothic novels of Walpole like The Castle of Otranto (1764) in which a mysterious helmet crashes into the castle with the dreamlike inevitability of the growing corpse invading Amdes apartment in Ionescos play.28 In spite of its contemporary appearance, the theatre of the Absurd is not a modern production, as Martin Esslin observed, it is a new combination of a number of ancient archaic traditions of literature and drama.29 The Theatre of the Absurd is in fact a development of old scattered traditions, including, the mime tradition, the clowns of the Greek and the Roman theatre, the art of Pantomine30 that existed in England, the Roman and Greek tradition of using dreams, symbols and allegorical characters. Also from the medieval morality plays it took the use of fools and foolery scenes in drama, of which Shakespeare presented many examples, and even the ritual and religious traditions of the ritual drama that went back to the very origins of the dramatic art when religion and drama were the same.31 Thus, one can see that most of the absurd plays, if not all, are obviously reflections of these traditions. Obviously, Becketts Act without Words I (1976) depends entirely on mime, gestures and physical actions. Thus, in this play we can see one player doing all the action on the stage. Genets plays are based on ritual and mimetic action, in The Black (1979) much of the action depends on dancing, clapping, and performance of the ritual of killing and death. Moreover, the clown

character who appears in many of the absurd plays is actually a character seen before in Shakespeares theatre, the fool in King Lear, the madness of Ophelia, and Richard II. Martin Esslin said that there is in Shakespeare a very strong sense of futility and absurdity of the human condition.32 The use of dream-like and nightmares is not an invented device of the absurd theatre thus, it has its root in Strindbergs plays (1899-1912), in which one can see the influence of the world of terror and nightmares of Strindberg on Arthur Admovs plays.33 His play Professor Taranne (1952) is about a professor who finds himself moving in a world of nightmares, a world both frightening and absurd. Also Genet is clearly interested in presenting plays in which man, caught in the hall of mirrors of the human condition, inexorably trapped by an endless progression of images that are merely his own distorted reflection lies covering lies, fantasies battening upon fantasies, nightmares nourished by nightmares within nightmares.34 Moreover, there were many influences that helped in the emergence of the absurd theatre, and led to its dominance during the 1950s and 1960s. The hard and complicated conditions of life that resulted from World War II and its harsh experiences paved the way to the present state of modern man, who was forced to lead a continuous struggle to prove his identity which is lost. As all attempts proved useless, man was obliged to find a new means to express himself. In other words to verify his existence. Man is essentially frustrated, and divided against himself, while he lives in society; man is torn by intolerable contradictions; in a condition of essential absurdity.35

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From this point the existentialist philosophers began their search for the self. And this philosophy was one of the most important shaping factors of the absurd theory. After the 1940s, however, there was a widespread tendency, especially prominent among the existentialist philosophers and adopted by men of letters such as, the French novelist and philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre (19051980) to view man as an isolated existent who was cast into an alien universe. They also conceived of the universe as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning. And aim to represent human life, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the nothingness where it must end, as an existence which is both anguished and absurd.36 Furthermore, the existentialists gave their characters the freedom to make their choice through a consciousness of the nature of their existence in an absurd world.37 However, the absurd playwrights permit their characters no choice. They do not suggest any path beyond the terrifying static reality of the absurd state of existence. The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. While Sartre or Camus express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed.38 While the existentialists deal with the absurdity of human existence rationally, using philosophical language, the absurd dramatists express it in concrete yet irrational dramatic images. They offer us the opportunity to think of absurdity, and to feel or

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experience it with the actors and the author, who transformed his philosophy into symbolic stage images. The spirit of absurdity, however, can be traced back to the year 1896, which witnessed the first performance of Alfred Jarrys (1873-1907) Ubu Roi.39 The play caused a great shock to its first audience. The impact was quick and direct because of its vulgar language. It presented a strange fantasy of the grotesque cruel king, Ubu, who was engaged in senseless slaughters. Jarry created a mythical figure and a world of strange images. Ubu made himself the king of Poland, killed and tortured the people. He was a cruel and savage tyrant who did all sorts of terrible deeds till he was chased out of the country. Yet, surprisingly, all the events were set in a comic shape.40 Jarrys technical innovations, his use of masks, rejection of realism, presentation of puppet-like characters in comic situations, and his non-sensical use of language anticipated the development of absurdity on the modern stage. Moreover, it left a significant mark on a mixing of genres since this play, Ubu Roi, is a tragic-comedy. Another important source of influence on absurdists was found in the works of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). His real contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd was in his theatrical writings and practical experiments as a producer upon which the absurdists depended widely. He wanted to let the theatre express what language could not. He made use of myth, symbol, ritual, and gesture to break through the rational barrier of language in order to reach the deepest levels of the conscious.41 The absurd, as Harry T. Moore points out, has always confronted man, but perhaps never so much as today when he seems to have

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virtually everything within his grasp and may lose the grasp itself. Life consistently invents its own scenarios of absurdity.42 So the Theatre of the Absurd was born out of harsh life experiences to show the universal image of man searching for his lost identity. And each writer had his unique way in presenting the gloomy picture of modern man and his terrible existence within the void. In Esslins words, those absurd playwrights had in common a sense of the metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition.43 Thus, their work presents a vision, feeling or cognition of world and man44 after World War II. Absurd drama, as Charles R. Lyons asserts rejects realism which began at the end of the nineteenth century and which indirectly led to the appearance of the experiments of Symbolism, Expressionism and Surrealism.45 In their emphasis upon the dynamic process of the unconscious mind, symbolism, expressionism and surrealism questioned the significance of objective reality. The major plays of the Theatre of the Absurd question the integrity of both objective and subjective visions of experience.46 The plays by Ionesco, Genet and Beckett purposely break the conventions of realism by refusing to present images of human beings who practice a reasonable behaviour in a life-like scene within orderly time. It was difficult to those who live in such a mad world, to accept an art based on a traditional form. So the theatre of the absurd was a kind of reaction or refusal to all traditional values, searching for a new way to express the situation of modern man which may also be seen as all human fate.47 In other words the

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unusual situation of man facing the harsh reality of an absurd world needs a unique form of expression. That is what most, may be all, of the absurd playwrights wanted to achieve in their plays. Each one worked hard to mirror the harsh reality of his age. They wanted to present a basic situation, idea and thought in their plays. Eugne Ionesco explained this when he discusses his play The Bald Soprano (1948), he said that, [The play] represented, for me, a kind of collapse of reality. Words had become empty, noisy shells without meaning; the characters as well, of course, had become psychologically empty. Everything appeared to me in an unfamiliar light, people moving in a timeless time, in a spaceless space The Smiths, the Martins, can no longer be, they can become anybody, anything, for having lost their identity, they assume the identity of others, become part of the world of the impersonal; they are interchangeable: you can put Martin in place of Smith and vice versa, no one will notice.48 From this speech one can see that the most important thing is presenting the idea. In other words what matters is the goal not the means. A character stands for humanity at large. That is to say the character in an absurd play can reflect the most obvious problems in the world. That is true in most of the absurd plays especially all-male plays by Beckett and Pinter in which there is no woman on the stage. But, at the same time the male in these plays stands for mankind thus, the real absence here, is the absence of gender not male or female. Gender is lost as well as identity in such plays. Martin Esslin said that, In the Theatre of the Absurd, , the audience is confronted with characters where motives and

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actions remain largely incomprehensible. With such characters it is almost impossible to identify; the more mysterious their action and their nature, the less human the characters become, 49 (italics mine) Man in absurd plays is like his world empty and deprived of all senses of life. That is very clear in many of Becketts and Pinters plays through presenting a clear image of the sadness of all human fate.50 There is a clear reference to this condition in Becketts Endgame (1957) in which Clov and Hamm are looking out through the window at an empty and dead world. It is an image of alienation, strangeness, and remoteness which is reflected in Hamms blindness and inability to move. Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon? Clov: What in Gods name could there be on the horizon? (pause) Hamm: The waves, how are the waves? Clov: The waves? Lead. Hamm: And the sun? Clov: (looking) zero. Hamm: Is it night already then? Clov: (looking) No. Hamm: Then what is it? Clov: (looking) Grey Grey! Grey! (italics mine) (Endgame, 107) So it is the state of inaction in which man is imprisoned in a never changing situation that suggests modern mans fateful existence. In Happy Days (1961), Beckett gives another example of a never changing situation. Winne, a well-preserved fifty-year old blond woman is embedded up to her waist in the centre of the stage. She is in one infinite moment of a zero continuity of time when

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things pass so slow that no change can be noticed. It is life which is not over yet, that reflects the condition of modern man and his pointless existence. Thus, the absurd plays provide the audience with a new sort of characters who embody the miseries, boredom, and suffering of being. And of course, the basic feature of those characters is their loss of identity or self-fragmentation. That is clearly in many of Becketts plays such as Not I. Charles R. Lyons says that Since Godot Beckett has attempted to remove the presence of his characters from the context of a coherent narrative he removes the source of that vitality by eliminating the characters awareness of both location and self.51 So what we can find on the absurd stage is a kind of anti-heroes who lack the traditional shape and of course, the meaning of the traditional hero. In many absurd plays, the action centers on beggars, tramps, half crazy, without memories, paralysed, blind, and rejected by the society. So Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Pinter for instance tried to present this kind of hero as a lonely man at the edge of being, men in a static moment of being, a moment in which all are equal in lost qualities of certainty and identity. And of course, for all these features sex becomes pointless even the traditional implication of a female figure becomes unfitting. In other words those playwrights present a symbol of all human miseries, boredom, meaningless, and mess in which all are melted in one unit of human suffering. In a moment when all are equal and nameless those stage figures share the deep feeling of pain, It is a state of life-in-death or death-in-life,52 where there is no meaning or importance of sex, name or identity.

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Birth and death are two important and difficult moments in life in which are equal. 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.53 Absurd plays have no logical plot hence no logical characterization in any conventional sense. Their characters lack the motivations found in realistic drama, and so emphasize their purposelessness. The absence of plot serves to reinforce the monotony and repetitive nature of time in human affairs. The dialogue is commonly no more than a series of inconsequential clichs which reduce those who speak them merely to talking machines.54 The absurdists wrote plays in which everything was out of harmony or reason. They wanted their audience to make sense out of no sense. These plays, in fact, were: an effort to make man a ware of the ultimate realities of his condition, to instill in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish, to shock him out of existence that has become trite, mechanical, complacent, and deprived of the dignity that comes of awareness.55 One of the most important aspects of absurd drama is its distrust of language as a means of communication. For those writers, words failed to express the essence of human experience, the deep sense of absurdity. Language only could express and deal with the superficial aspects of things. So what happens on the stage is more

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important than language and hence silence is more meaningful than words. Moreover, one can say that words fail to clarify the nature and gender of the characters. Also the absurdists tried to reflect the lack of communication felt by modern man in which people are unable to communicate with each other, they do not know how. Pinter says that such a weight of words confronts us, day in day out, the bulk of it a stale dead terminology; ideas endlessly repeated and permutated, become platitudinous, trite, meaningless.56 In Ionescos The Chairs (1951) the poetic content of a powerfully poetic play did not lie in the band words that were spoken to an ever growing number of empty chairs. Esslin says that 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.57 The use of dreams and nightmares was an important device in the theatre of the absurd, although it was not an original one. The absurdists used this device illogically in their plays. This device helped the audience to think more about their existence. Dreams do not develop logically, they develop by association,58 and do not communicate ideas, but rather communicate images. The growing corpse in Ionescos Amde could be understood as a poetic image.59 The aim behind using such images was to know the truth of the human condition in such a world. Amde: A mushroom! Well really! If theyre going to start growing in the diningroom! Its the last straw! poisonous, of course! She must have seen enough by now! Weve both seen

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enough of him! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! (Amde, pp. 27-28) Ionesco put a dream-like situation onto the stage, in which the rules of realistic theatre no longer existed. In The Chairs (1952) Ionesco presents a static image of an elderly couple, filling a room with chairs for nonexistent visitors. In this play he tried to deal with emptiness and with humans fear. Esslin says The criteria of achievement in the Theatre of the Absurd are not only the quality of invention, the complexity of the poetic images evoked and the skill with which they are combined and sustained but also, and even more essentially, the reality and truth of the vision these images embody for all its freedom of invention and spontaneity, the Theatre of the Absurd is concerned with communicating an experience of being, and in doing so it is trying to be uncompromisingly honest and fearless in exposing the reality of the human condition.60 The situation is amusing, but the implication is menacing.61 That is the case in many absurd plays in which pain and pleasure united to reflect the absurdity of modern man. This was a special characteristic of the absurd plays especially those of Becketts and Pinters. John Russell Taylor says that All of these plays are both frightening and funny, crating an atmosphere of nameless, undefined terror and at the same time shocking us into laughter.62 This was obvious in Pinters The Birthday Party (1958), in which we can see the hidden feelings of fear, terror and menace were shrouded by the funny atmosphere of Stanleys birthday party. Thus,

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for Pinter Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny.63 It is the same atmosphere in most of Becketts plays. In his plays namely Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days and others, J. L. Styan says that Beckett has invented a screen of laughter through which to conceal and filter his nightmare; the claw exhibits the life-and-death tensions of the fool on the high wire; the bowler is part of the circus-ring mask behind which to conceal the sensitive tissue of a human face. The laughter is that of hysteria, a paroxysm that suggests a serious mental disturbance.64 May be it is the cause which made the theatre of the absurd more widely acceptable.65 But still the mere fact is as Esslin says discussing the importance of the theatre of the absurd a phenomenon like the Theatre of the Absurd does not reflect despair or a return to dark irrational forces but expresses modern mans endeavour to come to terms with the world in which he lives. It attempts 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 for the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusionsand to laugh at it.66 (italics mine)

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NOTES

Jacques Barzun, From Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of Heritage, in Great Issues in Western Civilization, 4th edited by Brian Tierney, Donald Kagan and L. Pearce Williams (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992), p. 375. Boris Ford, ed. The Modern Age. Vol. 17 (London: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 17. Louis Breger, Freud, Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.), p. 3. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1961), p. 290. Boris Ford, ed. The Present. Vol. 8 (England: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 39-40.
6 5 4 3 2

Martin Esslin, p. 290. Ibid., P.290 Ibid.,P.290

William Fleming, Arts and Ideas (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1961), p. 717. Bamber Gascoigne, Twentieth-Century Drama (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1962), p. 11.
11 10

William Fleming, p. 717. Ibid., p. 718. Ibid., p. 719.

12

13

21
14

Ibid., p. 733. Gascoigne, p. 11. Breger, p. 266.

15

16

Theatre of the Absurd Encyclopedia Britannica 2004. Encyclopedia Britannica Premium Service. 24 June 2004 http://www. britannica.comleb/article.
18

17

Esslin, p. 16.

Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (London: T. and A. Constable Ltd., 1966), p. 175.
20 21

19

Ibid., P.175 Quoted in Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 16.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin OBrien (London: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 108. Arnold P. Hinchliffe, The Absurd: The Critical Idiom (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1969), p. 39.
24 25 23

22

Quoted in Ibid, P.39 Quoted in Ibid, P.38 Quoted in Ibid, p. 39. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 255. Ibid, P.255

26

27

28 29

Martin Esslin, Introduction, in Absurd Drama: Amde and other Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987). p. 15. C. Hugh Holman, Pantomime, in A Handbook to Literature, 4th ed. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Mervill Co. Ind., 19085), p. 316. In its broad sense the term means silent acting. It is the form of dramatic activity in which silent motion; gesture, facial expression, and costume are relied upon to express emotional states or narrative situations.
30

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31

Esslin, Introduction, in Absurd Drama, p. 15. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 237-36. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 151. Williams, p. 189.

32

33

34

35

Philip W. Goetz, ed., Existentialism, in The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Chicago University Press, 1986, Vol. 25, p. 624.
37

36

Ibid., p. 622. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 17. Esslin, Introduction in Absurd Drama, p. 16. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 258. Ibid., pp. 278-79.

38

39

40

41

Harry T. Moore, Twentieth-Century French Literature (London: Heinemann Educational Book Ltd., 1966), p. 147.
43

42

Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 17.

Darko Suvin, Becketts Purgatory of the Individual , or the 3 Laws of thermodynamics in Tulane Drama Review, Part 4, 1967, p. 3. Charles R. Lyons, Samuel Beckett (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 16.
46 45

44

Ibid., p. 17. Suvin, p. 33.

47

Quoted in Robert W. Corrigan, The World of the Theatre (London: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1979), pp. 210-11.

48

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49

Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 299-300. Suvin, p. 32. Lyons, p. 155. Suvin, p. 24. Esslin, Introduction in Absurd Drama, p. 23.

50

51

52

53

Randolph Goodman, Drama on Stage, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), p. 643.
55

54

Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 291. Quoted in Robert W. Corrigan, p. 212. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 18. Esslin, Introduction in Absurd Drama, p. 16. Ibid., p. 11. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 308-309.

56

57

58

59

60

James T. Boulton, Harold Pinter: The Caretaker and Other Plays in Pinter: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 102. John Russell Taylor, Harold Pinter (Essex: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1969), p. 7.
63 62

61

Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 211.

J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy, 2nd ed. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 223. J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd, Vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 127.
66 65

64

Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 313-14.