Samuel Beckett

Little is Left to Tell

Explanation of the Absurd

Characteristics of the movement include illogical situations, unconventional dialogue, and minimal plots in an attempt to reflect the absurdity of human existence.

‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was not the name of the movement to which playwrights such as Beckett and Pinter claimed to be part of, but instead a name given to their work by others. To be part of the ‘anti-theatre’ movement was found more acceptable, as they attacked traditional artforms as no longer being valid in this pointless existence.

The ‘absurd’ in this sense refers not to the ridiculous, but to being ‘out of harmony’. While the theatre was shocking to audiences, viewing it as ‘absurd’, Camus argues

that it is the world that is absurd.Eugene Ionesco claimed that the ‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose…’

WW2The First World War was supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars’, so the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, along with the atrocities it brought, destroyed all the basic assumptions people had about life.

Faced with the horrors of the holocaust and the atomic bomb, people began to lose their faith in God.

The attitude of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ is perhaps best summarised by Beckett’s character, Clov, who questions ‘…You and I mean something?’

Origins of the Absurd

Friedrich Nietzsche ‘God is Dead’In 1883 a revolutionary thesis was published by

the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was called ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’ and it declared that ‘God is dead’.

Nietzsche wrote of religion, morality, philosophy and contemporary culture, he has been a great influence in many fields including Existentialism and Post Modernism as he radically questioned the value of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter was born in 1930 and frequently comments on the ‘irrelevancy of everyday speech’.

- ‘Mountain Language’

Despite having been criticised for not having fully rounded characters, Pinter defends this as being more realistic.

He is critical of communication but suggests that people permanently try to avoid it, rather than simply being bad at it.

Famous for ‘The Pinter Pause’

Harold Pinter

Pinter’s first full-length play, ‘The Birthday Party’ can be seen to comment on conformity, death, and ‘the individual’s pathetic search for security’.

Like Beckett before him, in 2005 Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

•Pinter seems to be obsessed with the most basic of theatrical techniques, particularly the traditional idea of suspense.

- ‘The Room’- ‘The Dumb Waiter’

The Birthday Party

Eugène Ionesco

Born in Romania 18 years before Pinter, Eugène Ionesco also felt a need to break down language, believing it had developed into ‘nothing but clichés’.

- ‘To renew the language is to… renew the vision of the world’

•Ionesco claims to have felt ‘embarrassed’ by ‘the crude strings of theatre’, and so was almost reluctant to begin writing plays. His first, ‘La Cantratrice Chauve’ (The Bald Prima Donna), was intended to be a very serious piece about ‘the tragedy of language’, but it was perhaps taking this concept too far that led to initial audiences viewing it to be a comedy.

Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco criticises our willingness to accept the ideas forced upon us by the media, and our lack of individuality as a result.

He agrees that the audience must be confronted to think for themselves, but claims that Brecht doesn’t go far enough with his concept of alienation, which aims to put emotions aside to allow an audience to intellectualise what they see onstage.

Comedy is employed in some of his plays to shock the audience. In ‘La Jeune Fille à Marier, a young girl who has just finished her studies is described by her mother. When the girl eventually appears ‘she is a man, about thirty years old, robust and virile, with a bushy black moustache, wearing a grey suit.’

Ionesco protests that the breaking down of a play into parts is ‘rather artificial’.

Anti- Theatre

The term ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was first coined by Martin Esslin in his 1961 book. The playwrights included in this prefer to use the term ‘anti-theatre’, which was founded in the 1950s.

In 1953, Ionesco used the subtitle ‘anti-play’ for his piece ‘Bald Prima Donna’, which made the term accessible for critics and the media.

‘Anti-Theatre’ combines futurism and surrealism, and illustrates a rejection of the traditional psychological play.

It can be characterised by a critical and ironic attitude towards the traditions of society and art.

It claims that the stage is no longer able to give an accurate account of the modern world, and embraces illogical action and a rejection of all values.

In literary theatre, the emphasis is usually on the language itself, while the language is often contradictory to the action onstage in anti-literary theatre.

ImpactThe ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ can be seen as a statement of hopelessness, but for

this entire movement to have been born out of something as universally depressing as a world war perhaps casts some hope. ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ forces us to face the awful situations we have brought upon ourselves, and so society can choose to do something about it.

It has been suggested that the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was only a product of a very specific point in history and consequently since gone ‘the way of the dinosaur’.

-It could also be claimed, however, that the sense of ‘absurdity’ in theatre has only disappeared as it has become more acceptable and less shocking to audiences.

Samuel Barclay Beckett

(possibly April 13, 1906 –

December 22, 1989)

was an absurdist Irish

playwright, novelist and poet.

Although Beckett insisted he

was born on Good Friday, April

13 1906, his birth certificate

puts the date a month later.

Education•studied French, Italian and English at

Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927,

•massive influence: James Joyce

•1929 he published his first work, a critical essay defending Joyce's work

•major influence: René Descartes

•In 1930, he returned to Trinity College as a lecturer

•left after less than two years, and began to travel throughout Europe

•spent time in London, publishing his critical study of Proust there in 1931

•Undergoes two years of Jungian psychotherapy

Career

•Taught in Paris

•writing career, secretarial duties for James Joyce

•1929: "Assumption” published

•1930 he won a small literary prize with his poem "Whoroscope“

•World War II, Beckett in Paris, even after it had become occupied by the Germans. He joined the underground movement and fought for the resistance until 1942 when several members of his group were arrested and he was forced to flee with his French-born wife to the unoccupied zone

•In 1945, after it had been liberated from the Germans, he returned to Paris and began his most prolific period as a writer

•Beckett was the first of the absurdists to win international fame

•works translated into over twenty languages

•continued to write until his death in 1989, but the task grew more and more difficult with each work until, in the end, he said that each word seemed to him "an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

Theatrical Style•Beckett's theatre is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and

deeply pessimistic about human nature and the human situation

•explores his themes in increasingly cryptic and attenuated style

•Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1969

•Themes in plays include: mirroring own search for freedom, revolving around a young man's efforts to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations, life means waiting, killing time and clinging to the hope that relief may be just around the corner

•trades in plot, characterization, and final solution, which had hitherto been the hallmarks of drama, for a series of concrete stage images

•language is useless, for he creates a mythical universe peopled by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the unexpressable

•characters exist in a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of communication, then crawling on, endlessly

Dramatic WorksEleutheria (1940s, first published 1995)

Waiting for Godot (first published 1952) Endgame (published 1957) Happy Days (published 1960) All That Fall (radio play, 1956) Act Without Words I (1956) Act Without Words II (1956) Krapp's Last Tape (1958) Rough for Theatre I (late 1950s) Rough for Theatre II (late 1950s) Embers (1959) Rough for Radio I (radio play, never broadcast, 1961, rewritten as Cascando) Rough for Radio II (radio play, early 1960s) Words and Music (radio play, 1961) Cascando (radio play, 1962) Play (1963) Film (film, 1963) The Old Tune (radio play, adaptation of Robert Pinget's La Manivelle, published 1963) Come and Go (1965) Eh Joe (television play, 1965) Breath (1969) Not I (1972) That Time (1975) Footfalls (1975) Ghost Trio (television play, 1975) ... but the clouds ... (television play, 1976) A Piece of Monologue (1980) Rockaby (1981) Ohio Impromptu (1981) Quad (1982) Catastrophe (1982) Nacht und Träume (television play, 1982) What Where (1983)

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Read more: Ever Tried? ever Failed? No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.

act without words 1

act without words 1

Estragon: Let's go.Vladimir: We can't.Estragon: Why not?Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.Estragon: (despairingly). Ah!

Waiting For Godot

Nell: Nothing is

funnier than

unhappiness.

Nagg: Oh?

Nell: Yes, yes, it's the

most comical thing in

the world. And we

laugh, we laugh, with

a will, in the

beginning. But it's

always the same

thing. Yes, it's like the

funny story we have

heard too often, we

still find it funny, but

we don't laugh any

more.

Endgame

Something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do – for any length of time. That is what enables me to go on, go on talking that is. Whereas if you were to die to speak in the old style or go away and leave me, then what would I do, what could I do, all day long, I mean between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep? Simply gaze before me with compressed lips

Happy Days

PLAy

Little is left to tell

OHio Impromptu