Theatre of the Absurd

Martin Esslin, a theater critic, coined the term “Theater of the Absurd” to
describe a number of works being produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s that
defied any traditional genres. The most famous playwright associated with this
movement include Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and of
course, Harold Pinter. Theater of the Absurd applies to a group of plays with a certain
set of characteristics. These characteristics convey a sense of bewilderment, anxiety,
and wonder in the face of an unexplainable feeling. These plays all have unusual
actions and are missing a key element that would clearly define other pieces of
literature. Language and actions differ from the usual and sometimes cannot be
explained in the Theater of the Absurd.
The term "absurd" was originally used by Albert Camus in his 1942 essay
“Myth of Sisyphus,” wherein he described the human condition as “meaningless and
absurd.” The key element to an absurdist play is that the main characters are out of
sync with the world around them. There is no discernable reasoning behind their
strangeness, though a threatening sense of change shakes their existence to the core.
Influences on the absurdist theater go as far back as the Elizabethan tragicomedies of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The tragic plays Macbeth and Hamlet offer
segments of comedy that shift the play's perspective, if only for the briefest moments.
Other influences on the absurdist playwrights include the work of Sigmund Freud, and
the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which introduced the avant-garde to
mainstream media.
However, the largest influence was World War II and its aftermath. Like Pinter,
who was a child during the war, many Englishmen and women felt disillusioned once
the war was over. They were angry and upset with the world, but found it difficult to
express their collective opinions. The drama of the absurdist theater is dreamlike,
almost lyrical. Like the Surrealists before them, the absurdist playwrights use imagery,
subtext, mythology, and allegory to express a deeper meaning which is often never
fully explained. In fact, the playwrights of the Theater of the Absurd allowed their
plays to speak for themselves. Pinter explained this absurdist concept best in his 1962
speech “Writing for the Theatre.” The thin line between truth and lies is perhaps the
defining characteristic of the Theater of the Absurd.
Eugène Ionesco (1909 – 1994)
He was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of
the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most
banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human
existence in a tangible way. He completed all of his secondary education there and
specialized in French at the University of Bucharest. From 1936 to 1938 he taught
French in a secondary school in Bucharest.
Two years after his marriage in 1936 to Rodica Burileano, he received a grant
from the French government to study in France and write a thesis on Sin and Death in
French Poetry Since Baudelaire. During the war he worked as a proofreader for a
Paris publishing house. Like Samuel Beckett, Ionesco began his theatre career late; he
did not write his first play until 1948 (La Cantatrice chauve, first performed in 1950
with the English title The Bald Soprano,  Jacques ou la soumission translated as Jack,
or The Submission (1950), La Leçon translated as The Lesson (1950), and another
plays.)
At the age of 40, he decided to learn English using the Assimil method,
conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to memorize them. Re-reading
them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was discovering
some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the
ceiling is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew, but which suddenly
struck him as being as stupefying as they were indisputably true. 
During the next 20 years Ionesco's predominant theme was the subject of death, in
such plays as Hunger and Thirst (1964), in which the protagonist (Berenger again) tried
to escape death as represented by his wife and child; in The Killing Game (1970) an
epidemic has taken away the inhabitants of a village. According to one critic, for Ionesco
death represented the threat of nothingness, the "quintessence of the Absurd."   Many of
Ionesco's plays had a dream-like quality. People can be transformed into animals or
change their identity; they walked in the air or continued to grow after death. Ionesco
preferred a series of states of consciousness over traditional plots. These dream-like
qualities became more prominent in later plays, such as L'Homme aux Valises (1975)
and Journey Among the Dead (1980).
Eugène Ionesco died at age 84 on 28 March 1994 and is buried in the Cimetière du
Montparnasse in Paris.
The Chairs: Showing The Absurdity And the Human Condition
The Chairs broke new ground in the improvement of Ionesco's theater by
presenting a graceful component of which his prior plays had given little sign.
Although associated with the prior plays by nonsense components, disengaged speech,
and bewilderment of the observer, The Chairs sets up a mindful, elegiac tone that
anticipates both Exits the King and the best plays of Beckett, who's Sitting tight for
Godot were destined to be created just first time.
Ionesco was one of the authors of Theatre of the Absurd, the French after war
showy development. The Absurdists imparted numerous plans to the existentialist
ideas, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Most importantly, the
existentialists accepted man's condition known to mankind was absurd and hence good
for nothing. Just by submitting oneself capably to a more prominent great, they
thought, could life have meaning. The old man in The Chairs surely focuses on this; he
feels his life of enduring will have meaning once he imparts his message and spares
mankind. Be that as it may, when the Speaker at long last conveys the message, it
comes out distorted, silly, nonsensical—at the end of the day, it is absurd.
A large number of the occasions in The Chairs are absurd, underscoring the
loneliness of human presence and the hunger human contact. The failure of the
message can be ascribed to the way that the old man didn't assume liability for his life.
Most outstandingly, in the play we see him and his wife make a fanciful world so they
can escape from the genuine one. Escape denotes the man's character for quite a bit of
his life. He denies being off base in his fractures with his sibling and somebody named
Carel, and his twofold self-destruction with his wife is another type of escape.
The Old Man acts like a youngster, getting out for his mom as he sits in his
wife’s lap. The Old Woman makes strange sexual motions as she plays with one of the
undetectable visitors. The visitors are undetectable; however, the Old Man and Old
Woman converse with them as though they were genuine. The Old Man is edgy to
hand-off his significant message for the world; yet his welcomed crowd—including
the Head—is undetectable. The Old Man enlists an Orator to transfer this significant
message. After the couple ends it all, it is uncovered that the Orator is hard of hearing
quiet—he can't convey the message to the invisible audience. He attempts to compose
it on the writing slate, yet can just deal with a few understandable words. These
absurdities underline the silly idea of human life.
Like all humans, the Old Man and Old Woman are isolated from each other and
the rest of the human race. They live on an island and seem to have little contact with
others. When they finally receive guests in their home, their guests are invisible,
emphasizing their isolation. Only the Orator is more isolated than the elderly couple—
he must face the invisible crowd alone. Every character in The Chairs tries to make
contact with other people and overcome their isolation; tragically, these people are
invisible.
The play rotates around the Old Man's endeavors to communicate his message
to the world. To that end he has welcomed numerous notable individuals into his home
to hear it. His wife attempts to demoralize him from holding his gathering that night
however the visitors have just started to show up. Yet the guests are invisible; there is
nobody to hear the Old Man's message. The couple experiences the customs with these
undetectable visitors—but in reality, they are speaking with nobody. They don't speak
with one another.
The Orator additionally underscores this topic. A hard of hearing quiet, he
communicates with noises and gestures that the invisible crowd doesn't comprehend.
He attempts to impart through composition; however, he can just compose illogical
words. At the point when his endeavors to communicate fail, the Orator becomes upset
and leaves.