Theatre of the Absurd Drama

Senarath Tennakoon

Plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Adamov flouted all the standards by which drama has been judged for centuries. When these were first performed the audiences and the critics were puzzled as these were not well-made plays.

A well made play was expected to have a beginning, middle and an end. Such a play had a plot and its flow was often linear. Absurd Drama often had no distinguishable plots, logically built-up dialogues, several characters and often begins at an arbitrary point and ends arbitrarily.

For instance in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot there were internal conflicts but there was no plot and there was no story and he did not want the audience to go home satisfied after seeing his creation thinking that a solution has been offered by him to an issue or a problem. In essence in Godot nothing happens as in human life.

It’s only waiting and waiting and waiting for something to come through which is very true in respect of many people’s lives. What these playwrights wanted was nothing but to express their vision of the world as best as they imagine without being imprisoned in tradition or convention; thus creating a new convention. In Ionesco’s Ameldee’there is a dream like situation on the stage where a middle aged couple are living with a corpse in their bedroom. The corpse keeps on growing bigger and bigger as it is suffering from the incurable disease of the dead.

At one instance an enormous limb of the corpse bursts into the living room. Ameldee revolves on poetic imagery. The growing corpse signifies growing power, previous errors, declining love or the death of affection or some evil that grows with time. Adamov’s Professor Taranne’has evolved as a dream. In Albee’s Zoo Story’Peter a middle aged man meets Jerry a man in the thirty’s in a park. They come to know about them. They discuss personal problems. They argue and the shape of reality emerges from their speech events. It is essentially a study on schizophrenia and revolves around the issue of loneliness of the human subject.

Characters are very few in most of these plays and the characters face illogical and frightening situations (absurd) in life as in Edward Albee’s Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf”. It is looked upon as an allegory of American society, a poetic image of its emptiness and sterility (Ionesco, et al 1965).

It won the New York Drama Critics Award for Best play and subsequently came as a film where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton played the key roles. Absured Drama in general presents a disillusioned, harsh and stark picture of world. Man appears to be helpless and all alone in this world of confusion and complex nature.

It was Samuel Beckett who declared that the absurd drama expressed the sterile expectations of the human subject in the atomic age. The realism in these plays is a psychological and inner realism. They explore the human subconscious in depth rather than trying to describe the external appearance of human existence.

The playwrights challenge the existence of the human condition in a meaningless world in its mystery and absurdity. Ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The most significant and prominent feature of these plays is the richness of powerful speech acts and speech events restricted to a few strong characters in a restricted social context.

Fernando Arrabal’s Two Executioners”the action takes place in a very dark room with a door opening into the torture chamber and there is a table and three chairs in the middle of the room. The mother with her two sons appears and starts to speak about her husband who is to be executed.

To be continued