I Had Black Stool Today

THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

The Theatre of the Absurd is a term used by the critic Martin Esslin in 1962 to classify certain playwrights who wrote during the 1950's, mainly French, whose work is seen as a reaction against the traditional concepts of Western theater.

The term, which is coined as an alternative to anti-nouveau théâtre théâtre or has already passed to designate particularly the theater of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal, the first works Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet.

Many of the concerns This theater is motivated theoretical writings of Antonin Artaud in The Theater and Its Double "(1938) and, somehow, in the Brechtian notion of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), while the slapstick comedy is rooted in the films of Charles Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton.

Taking as its starting point the absurdity of life, seen so palpable and not as evocative as they did in the theater of Giraudoux, Anouilh, Sartre and Camus, the theater absurdity is not a movement or a school, the authors present a mixed picture. What they have in common is the widespread rejection of realistic drama and psychological basis of characterization, coherent structure, plot and confidence in communication dialogue.

Through defamiliarization processes and depersonalization, these playwrights, fiercely anti-Cartesian, dismounted the structures of language, logic and conventional consciousness.

The accepted belief that the world makes sense (a world that had recently suffered the experiences of Hiroshima and the death camps) is subverted and replaced a world where words and actions can be completely contradictory.

However, what is proposed is not so much meaningless as a perpetual extension of meaning, but to show hidden and bitter reality that underlies the idea of \u200b\u200bhappiness and comfort mode bourgeois life.

Each piece creates its own internal logic models relentless, sometimes sad (as in Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", 1952), pathetic (also in Beckett, "End heading ", 1957), anxious (in the work of Ionesco "The Lesson", 1950), comedy (also in other works of Ionesco, The Bald Soprano ", 1950), gruesome (in Arrabal's work," The graveyard of cars, "1958), humiliation (in the work of Adamov "Professor Taranne", 1953) or violent (as in Genet's work "The Balcony", 1957).

All of them, however, have in common the presentation of a grotesque reality.

The questioning of the leaders lined up inside or outside the stage affects three key areas: the character (which can change sex, personality or status), the plot (which is often circular, is not going nowhere and rejects any resolution aesthetics) and objects (which can grow to the point to expel the characters, as is in the works of Ionesco, or can also be minimized, as with Beckett, to frame the theme of emptiness and nothingness).