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Abstract: The author here gives introductions to the theatre of the absurd both in the west and the east, including their origins, reasons and developments.
Key words: absurd theatre, the West, the East
Introduction
“The theatre of the absurd” is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin for the work of a number of playwrights, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, absurd plays assumed a highly unusual, innovative form, directly aiming to startle the viewer, shaking him out of this comfortable, conventional life of everyday concerns. It was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless. This paper intends to make a comparison between the west and the east on the theatre of absurd.
1. The West
One of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language as a means of communication. Language had become a vehicle of conventionalized, stereotyped, meaningless exchanges. Words failed to express the essence of human experience, not being able to penetrate beyond its surface.
The Absurd Theatre is a theatre of situation, as against the more conventional theatre of sequential events. It presents a pattern of poetic images. In doing this, it uses visual elements, movement, and light. Unlike conventional theatre, where language rules supreme, in the Absurd Theatre language is only one of many components of its multidimensional poetic imagery.
2. The East
At the time when the first absurd plays were being written and staged in Western Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s, people in the East European countries suddenly found themselves thrown into a world where absurdity was an integral part of everyday living. Suddenly, you did not need to be an abstract thinker in order to be able to reflect upon absurdity: the experience of absurdity became part and parcel of everybody’s existence.
Hitler’s attempt to conquer Russia during the Second World War gave Russia a unique opportunity to extend its sphere of influence and at the same time to further the cause of the Soviet brand of socialism. Later, East European Soviet-type socialism proudly proclaimed that it had answers to all these questions and, moreover, that it was capable of eliminating suffering and setting all injustices right. To doubt this was subversive. Officially, it was sufficient to implement a grossly simplified formula of Marxism to all spheres of life and Paradise on Earth would ensue. It became clear very soon that this simplified formula offered even fewer real answers than various esoteric and complex Western philosophical systems and that its implementation by force brought enormous suffering.
From the beginning it was clear that the simplified idea was absurd: yet it was made to dominate all spheres of life. People were expected to shape their lives according to its dictates and to enjoy it. It was, and still is, an offence to be skeptical about Soviet-type socialism of you is a citizen of an East-European country. The Soviet-type system managed to bring the experience of what was initially a matter of concern for only a small number of sensitive individual in the West to whole nations in the East.
The western Theatre of the Absurd may be seen as the expression of frustration and anger of a handful of intellectuals over the fact that people seem to lead uninspired, second-rate and stereotyped existences, either by deliberate choice or because they do not know any better and have no idea how or ability by which to help themselves. Unlike in the West, may people in the East seem to have discovered that it is very uncomfortable to live under the command of second-rateness.
The rise of the Theatre of the Absurd in the East is connected with period of relative relaxation of the East European regimes after Stalin’s death. All the arts assumed rigidly conservative, 19th century realist forms, to which a strong political bias was added. 20th century developments, in particular the inter-war experiments with structure and form in painting and poetry were outlawed as bourgeois decadence.
The East European Absurd Theatre was undoubtedly inspired by Western absurd drama, yet it differed from it considerably in form, meaning and impact. Although East European authors and theatre producers were quite well acquainted with many West-European absurd plays from the mid to late 1950s onwards, nevertheless (with very few exceptions) these plays were not performed or even translated in Eastern Europe until the mid 1960s.
The line of argument of reformist, pro-liberalization Marxists in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s ran as follows: The Western Theatre of the Absurd recorded the absurdity of human existence as an immutable condition. All that the East-European absurdist plays were trying to do was to remove minor blemishes on the face of the Marxist model – and that was easily done.
It was only after later that some critics were able to point out that West European absurd dram was not in fact nihilistic and destructive and that it played the same constructive roles as East European drama attempted to play. On the few occasions that Western absurdist plays were actually staged in Eastern Europe, the East European audiences found the plays highly relevant. Like the inmates of a goal, people in Eastern Europe are possibly also freer of the numbing concerns of everyday living than the average Western man in the street. On the whole, East European absurd drama has been far less abstract and esoteric than its West European counterpart. Moreover, while the West European drama is usually considered as having spent itself by the end of the 1960s, several East European authors have been writing highly original plays in the absurdity mould, well into the 1970s.
The main difference between the West European and the East European plays is that while the West European plays deal with a predicament of an individual or a group of individuals in a situation stripped to the bare, and often fairly abstract and metaphysical essentials, the East European plays mostly show and individual trapped within the cogwheels of a social system. The social context of the West European absurd plays is usually subdued and theoretical: in the East European plays it is concrete, menacing and fairly realistic: it is usually covered by very transparent metaphors. The social context is shown as a kind of Catch-22 system – it is a set of circumstances whose joint impact crushes the individual. The absurdity of the social system is highlighted and frequently shown as the result of the actions of stupid, misguided or evil people – this condemnation is of course merely implicit. Although the fundamental absurdity of the life feature in these plays is not intended to be metaphysically conditioned – these are primarily pieces of social satire – on reflection, the viewer will realize that there is fundamentally no difference between the messages of the West European and the East European plays – except that the East European plays may be able to communicate these ideas more pressingly and more vividly to their audiences, because of their first-hand everyday experience of the absurdity that surrounds them.
Conclusion
It is perhaps quite interesting that even the Western absurd dramatists have gradually developed a need to defend basic human values. They have been showing solidarity with their East European colleagues. Ionesco was always deeply distrustful of politics and the clichéd language of the political establishment. Samuel Beckett has written a short play dedicated to Havel, which was staged in France in 1984 during a ceremony at the University of Toulouse, which awarded Havel an honorary doctorate.
Reference
Camus, Albert. The myth of Sisyphus ﹠Other Essays. New York: Random
House, 1955. Center for Comparative Cultural Studies. Irish Studies. The Absurdity of Samuel Beckett. Online. Internet. 15 March 1999. Gontarski, S.E. “The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Art.” Modern Critical views: Samuel Beckett. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. 227-245
Rhein, Phillip. Albert Camus. New York: Twayne, 1969. White, Edmund. “Once a Sodomite, Twice a Philosopher.” The Harvard Gay ﹠Lesbian Review 3.1 (Winter 1996): 4 pp. Online. Internet. March 1999.
Key words: absurd theatre, the West, the East
Introduction
“The theatre of the absurd” is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin for the work of a number of playwrights, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, absurd plays assumed a highly unusual, innovative form, directly aiming to startle the viewer, shaking him out of this comfortable, conventional life of everyday concerns. It was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless. This paper intends to make a comparison between the west and the east on the theatre of absurd.
1. The West
One of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language as a means of communication. Language had become a vehicle of conventionalized, stereotyped, meaningless exchanges. Words failed to express the essence of human experience, not being able to penetrate beyond its surface.
The Absurd Theatre is a theatre of situation, as against the more conventional theatre of sequential events. It presents a pattern of poetic images. In doing this, it uses visual elements, movement, and light. Unlike conventional theatre, where language rules supreme, in the Absurd Theatre language is only one of many components of its multidimensional poetic imagery.
2. The East
At the time when the first absurd plays were being written and staged in Western Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s, people in the East European countries suddenly found themselves thrown into a world where absurdity was an integral part of everyday living. Suddenly, you did not need to be an abstract thinker in order to be able to reflect upon absurdity: the experience of absurdity became part and parcel of everybody’s existence.
Hitler’s attempt to conquer Russia during the Second World War gave Russia a unique opportunity to extend its sphere of influence and at the same time to further the cause of the Soviet brand of socialism. Later, East European Soviet-type socialism proudly proclaimed that it had answers to all these questions and, moreover, that it was capable of eliminating suffering and setting all injustices right. To doubt this was subversive. Officially, it was sufficient to implement a grossly simplified formula of Marxism to all spheres of life and Paradise on Earth would ensue. It became clear very soon that this simplified formula offered even fewer real answers than various esoteric and complex Western philosophical systems and that its implementation by force brought enormous suffering.
From the beginning it was clear that the simplified idea was absurd: yet it was made to dominate all spheres of life. People were expected to shape their lives according to its dictates and to enjoy it. It was, and still is, an offence to be skeptical about Soviet-type socialism of you is a citizen of an East-European country. The Soviet-type system managed to bring the experience of what was initially a matter of concern for only a small number of sensitive individual in the West to whole nations in the East.
The western Theatre of the Absurd may be seen as the expression of frustration and anger of a handful of intellectuals over the fact that people seem to lead uninspired, second-rate and stereotyped existences, either by deliberate choice or because they do not know any better and have no idea how or ability by which to help themselves. Unlike in the West, may people in the East seem to have discovered that it is very uncomfortable to live under the command of second-rateness.
The rise of the Theatre of the Absurd in the East is connected with period of relative relaxation of the East European regimes after Stalin’s death. All the arts assumed rigidly conservative, 19th century realist forms, to which a strong political bias was added. 20th century developments, in particular the inter-war experiments with structure and form in painting and poetry were outlawed as bourgeois decadence.
The East European Absurd Theatre was undoubtedly inspired by Western absurd drama, yet it differed from it considerably in form, meaning and impact. Although East European authors and theatre producers were quite well acquainted with many West-European absurd plays from the mid to late 1950s onwards, nevertheless (with very few exceptions) these plays were not performed or even translated in Eastern Europe until the mid 1960s.
The line of argument of reformist, pro-liberalization Marxists in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s ran as follows: The Western Theatre of the Absurd recorded the absurdity of human existence as an immutable condition. All that the East-European absurdist plays were trying to do was to remove minor blemishes on the face of the Marxist model – and that was easily done.
It was only after later that some critics were able to point out that West European absurd dram was not in fact nihilistic and destructive and that it played the same constructive roles as East European drama attempted to play. On the few occasions that Western absurdist plays were actually staged in Eastern Europe, the East European audiences found the plays highly relevant. Like the inmates of a goal, people in Eastern Europe are possibly also freer of the numbing concerns of everyday living than the average Western man in the street. On the whole, East European absurd drama has been far less abstract and esoteric than its West European counterpart. Moreover, while the West European drama is usually considered as having spent itself by the end of the 1960s, several East European authors have been writing highly original plays in the absurdity mould, well into the 1970s.
The main difference between the West European and the East European plays is that while the West European plays deal with a predicament of an individual or a group of individuals in a situation stripped to the bare, and often fairly abstract and metaphysical essentials, the East European plays mostly show and individual trapped within the cogwheels of a social system. The social context of the West European absurd plays is usually subdued and theoretical: in the East European plays it is concrete, menacing and fairly realistic: it is usually covered by very transparent metaphors. The social context is shown as a kind of Catch-22 system – it is a set of circumstances whose joint impact crushes the individual. The absurdity of the social system is highlighted and frequently shown as the result of the actions of stupid, misguided or evil people – this condemnation is of course merely implicit. Although the fundamental absurdity of the life feature in these plays is not intended to be metaphysically conditioned – these are primarily pieces of social satire – on reflection, the viewer will realize that there is fundamentally no difference between the messages of the West European and the East European plays – except that the East European plays may be able to communicate these ideas more pressingly and more vividly to their audiences, because of their first-hand everyday experience of the absurdity that surrounds them.
Conclusion
It is perhaps quite interesting that even the Western absurd dramatists have gradually developed a need to defend basic human values. They have been showing solidarity with their East European colleagues. Ionesco was always deeply distrustful of politics and the clichéd language of the political establishment. Samuel Beckett has written a short play dedicated to Havel, which was staged in France in 1984 during a ceremony at the University of Toulouse, which awarded Havel an honorary doctorate.
Reference
Camus, Albert. The myth of Sisyphus ﹠Other Essays. New York: Random
House, 1955. Center for Comparative Cultural Studies. Irish Studies. The Absurdity of Samuel Beckett. Online. Internet. 15 March 1999. Gontarski, S.E. “The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Art.” Modern Critical views: Samuel Beckett. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. 227-245
Rhein, Phillip. Albert Camus. New York: Twayne, 1969. White, Edmund. “Once a Sodomite, Twice a Philosopher.” The Harvard Gay ﹠Lesbian Review 3.1 (Winter 1996): 4 pp. Online. Internet. March 1999.