THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is generally considered as the starting point of Absurd drama. The term “absurd”
was applied to the works of a group of dramatists who emerged in the 1950s: the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, the Russian
Arthur Adamov and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco. The sense of metaphysical anguish and rootlessness, lack of purpose
and inaction is the theme of the plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, who presented the concrete
situations of the absurdity of human condition on the stage. The Theatre of the Absurd tends to debase language: what
happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters; pauses, silences, miming
and farcical situations are common. The plays have no real story or plot to speak of; time and place are vague, there are
rarely recognisable characters, and dialogue often consists of incoherent babbling.

SAMUEL BECKETT
Life and works
Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in a Dublin suburb, into a Protestant family. He studied at a boarding school, then at
Trinity College, where he got a BA Degree in French and Italian. He moved to Paris, where he worked as a lecturer in
English. He became closely associated with James Joyce and his circle; he settled permanently in Paris in 1937, and
wrote most of his works first in French, the translated them into English. He began his literary career as a short-story
writer and a novelist. He was one of a group of dramatists (with Ionesco and Adamov) who developed the so-called
“Theatre of the Absurd”. The group’s common basic belief was that man’s life appears to be meaningless and purpose-
less and that human beings cannot communicate and understand each other. Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (1952) was
the first play in this style; it achieved immense success, regarded as the most original, influential play of the time, and
his protagonists (the tramps Vladimir and Estragon) became the emblems of the Absurd. The work “Endgame” (1958)
deals with the dissolution of the relationship between the physical and intellectual sides of man experienced at the
moment of his death; “Krapp’s last tape” (1958) is a monologue which underlines the impossibility for a man to find
an identity; “Happy Days” (1960) reduces the characters to motionless individuals; “Breath” (1969) shows how human
life has become mere sounds, if not silence. In 1969 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in France in 1989.