Theatre Of The Absurd Research Articles

Новый театр «Новых художников» и русский авангард

The multimedia practice of the Russian Avant-Garde, in which theatrical art is inseparable from literary, visual and musical art, found its continuation half a century later in the work of the New Artists group, founded by Timur Novikov in 1982 in Leningrad. This article is the first study of the so-called New Theatre of the New Artists, which is associated with the following happenings or performances: The Ballet of the Three Inseparables, Anna Karenina, The Idiot, and their predecessor, the literary-noise action The Medical Concert. The article discusses three elements of the avant-garde theatrical tradition that resonate with the New Theatre: Nikolai Evreinov’s comprehensive concept of the “theatre for oneself”, the musical-spatial theatrical experiments of Mikhail Matyushin and his followers, and the absurdist theatre of Daniil Kharms and OBERIU. The second and third, despite being so dissimilar to each other, share the borderline, where zaum (alogism) and absurdism converge. This very convergence creates a dynamic semantic tension that marks the ideas of both D. Kharms and T. Novikov: the tension between an uplifting absurdity, striving for the inexpressible, timeless and universal, and, conversely, a lowering, destructive absurdity. It is obvious that the distinction between the two types of absurdism is a fundamental problem of ontology not only of the Russian Avant-Garde. The New Theatre can be considered as a seismic activity that lasted for about three years at the borderline area of the avant-garde art that worked its way from Symbolism through Expressionism to Dadaism and Surrealism. On this borderline, creativity manifests itself as an impersonal or other-than-personal process that establishes a connection of a person with the rhythms of the world or, on the contrary, illustrates disintegration, deconstruction and the reassembly of society. The New Theatre that established in the Leningrad underground was not an imitation of the avant-garde practices but their rebirth, which proves that this form of creativity is organic for the culture of St. Petersburg.

‘Homecoming’: A Pinteresque Parable of Lost and Found

Pinter, the synonym for culture shock, is one of the prominent figures of the school that eventually matured up to become the Absurdist Theatre. Harold Pinter, the British playwright had a fifty- years long writing career, highly productive and significant as well. The equations of personal, family, social relationships are shattered or rather defined from a new perspective. Pinter’s debut play The Room gave way to the term ‘comedy of menace’, where a ‘one- person dialogue’ (rather than monologue) is the only format. Homecoming, a two-act play, won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play. The play as claimed by critics, is a metaphor of the true meaning and feel of Home and finding one. ‘Pinteresque’ is the term which was invented to define the genre that Harold Pinter’s play fall in as it was not I accordance with the formulaic scale. Evoking the truth, without decoration, devoid of any fake positivity or morality. He says it with words, he can tell it without words as well, with ‘silence’ at the right spot. Pinter owes a lot to Beckett theme-wise and style- wise. Beckett’s world is one of problems without solutions, bare reality and the inadequacy of words for expressing the emotions. The present paper is an effort to dive deep into the ‘Pinteresque’ portion of the Absurdist world and ponder over his style and thematic expression with special reference to the play The Homecoming.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EUGENE IONESCO AND JEAN GENET IN ABSURD THEATRE

The post-war world in the aftermath of Second World War has witnessed tumultuous changes in the society. All that had been considered sacrosanct till then, no longer enjoyed their dominance since it became natural to subject everything to question. Almost all spheres of life were severely influenced by the heart-wrenching effects of the catastrophic war. The degenerated human being suddenly looked for responses in an isolated world which he thought would heal him at that juncture. Under such bleak circumstances, playwrights around the world felt the heat to try out new ways to communicate their messages to the society. The Theatre of the Absurd was the apt medium of the time to realign theatrical performances to the changing realities of the world. Pioneers in this genre of theatre such as Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet composed their plays to tap the dying conscience of human society. This paper considers Ionesco’s The Chairs and Genet’s The Balcony in absurd theatre and aims to bring out the different aspects of absurdity as applied by the playwrights in their respective plays. It also attempts to show that irrespective of differences between them, how both the dramatists were successful in conveying their well-intended messages to their audiences.

Anathematizing Barthes and Admiring Beckett with Eugène Ionesco

This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett’s and Ionesco’s art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced ‘bewilderment’ in England and the US, he ignored the Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes’s polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco’s satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd’s Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters.

Existential Dualism and Absurdity: Modernist Theatricality in Wole Soyinka’sDeath and the King’s Horsemanand Samuel Beckett’sEndgame

AbstractWole Soyinka and Samuel Beckett apparently occupy distinct places in the literary space, in all ramifications. Specifically, while the former’s dramaturgy is definable within the context of the traditional convention of playwriting, otherwise known as well-made plays, the latter is inherently non-conformist in this regard. Hence, the effort in this paper was to locate a nexus in their writings, using two of their plays,Death and the King’s HorsemanandEndgame, respectively. Theatre of the Absurd, as an offshoot of existentialism, provided the ground for the critical intersection of philosophical and ideological geometry of the two plays. The critical paradigm essentially relied on the interconnectivity of absurdist writings and existentialist thoughts, as the holistic context which fundamentally defines modernism, to assess what is conceived as modernist theatricality in the two plays. Building on the modernists’ interrogation of man’s existence and essence in the world in which existential meaning is presumably lost, the paper concluded that the two texts are largely intoned with modernist thoughts, regardless of their formal or structural distinction. It arrived at this by placing particular emphasis on the playwrights’ attempts, in these works, at demanding a more spontaneous response to the question of the essence of the individual and his/her place in the universe in which meaning in existence, in the modernist sense, is believed to have been lost.

Абсурдизация действительности в сатирической пьесе Увидеть Солсбери Виктора Шендеровича

In 2018, the story of the unsuccessful poisoning of the Skripals by Russian special services shocked the world, and the further appearance of “Petrov” and “Boshirov” in an interview with Margarita Simonyan with completely implausible explanations led to the emergence of many memes and humorous works. The satirical play by Viktor Shenderovich To see Salisbury (2019) can be considered as one of the most significant reactions created by Russian-speaking society to the lies of the state. It is successfully performed abroad and, of course, has no chance of being staged in Russia. The author asks the question: what if everything that Petrov and Boshirov told in a scripted interview on the air of on Russia Today is true, and they are not unsuccessful spies, but a couple of gay lovers who are interested in Gothic cathedrals and the Charter of Liberties? Reflections on their own blurry unstable identity led the characters to an existential crisis in the spirit of the Theatre of the Absurd. This paper analyses how the absurdity of reality in the play serves to create a comic effect. Shenderovich grounds his satire based on direct citation of the precedent text of the interview, known a priori to every Russian-speaking recipient, on the intertexts of the Russian linguistic culture, fills the gaps of perception with paradoxes, and answers the questions asked by the audience after the RT broadcast (Why do the passport numbers differ by one digit? Why do the characters know Simonyan’s personal phone number? etc.).

A Horse Is a Horse

A Horse Is a Horse

Smith and Smitherson’s Theatre of the Absurd

Smith and Smitherson’s Theatre of the Absurd

“If We Changed Clothes, Sir, We Could Get Things Back to Normal”

“If We Changed Clothes, Sir, We Could Get Things Back to Normal”

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

To “Throw Off the Cloak of Representation”

To “Throw Off the Cloak of Representation”

Societal Resilience, A Key Factor in Combating Hybrid Threats

Abstract February 24, 2022 has changed the course of recent history, proving the greatest fears of Western states concerning the intentions of the Russian Federation regarding Ukraine and Europe. Hybrid warfare instruments used in Ukraine over the past decade have led to the destabilization of the security situation in eastern Ukraine, culminating in the invasion of a sovereign state and the outbreak of armed conflict. We are currently witnessing an absurd theater of contradictory news, a struggle for resources and state decisions taken in accordance with their concern for their own economy, cyber-attacks and revelations of a sensational sometimes with macabre overtones. The diversity and complexity of the hybrid threats so evident in today’s society, used as a military strategy prior to the armed conflict but especially since its inception, influences our perception and increases the effects of conventional warfare.

“In a Fiacre” by Arthur Adamov: poetics and problematics

Arthur Adamov’s radio play “En Fiacre” is still on the periphery of research interests. Created in 1959, and published in 1963, the play turns out to be material for philological study much less often than Adamov’s experiments on the field of political theatre, carried out at the same time. The article examines the autobiographical origins of the plot of the play “En Fiacre”, an attempt is made to substantiate the author’s choice; the significance for Adamov the artist of the parent-child relations influence theme on the entire human destiny is assessed. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the motif structure, in which the fault motive prevails, linking Adamov’s play with existential philosophy – fault, which acquires ontological connotations from Adamov. The theme of the meaninglessness of the world, seemingly contradicting the pathos of political theatre, remains in Adamov’s work even after, according to a number of researchers, he loses genuine interest in the theatre of the absurd. In addition, the article touches on the issue of intertextual connections, which are extremely important for understanding the creative method of Adamov. The article formulates the main conclusion regarding the poetics of Adamov, crystallised in his confessional prose “The Confession”.

A New Feminist Absurd?: Women’s Protest, Fury, and Futility in Contemporary American Theatre

Absurdism has long been associated with existentialist white male writers like the ones Martin Esslin analysed in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which coined the term that came to define a lasting dramatic genre. More recently, however, several female playwrights have begun to reinvent this movement with an uncanny brand of feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. In this essay, a close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) serves as a touchstone for analysing performances of ludic feminist futility in plays by diverse writers including Ruby Rae Spiegel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Alice Birch, and others. In their festive moments of anti-structural and non-linear oscillation between rage and glee, these plays mark the messy implosion of an outdated feminist political project, first anticipating and later reflecting the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 US presidential election. Often confining their characters within domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, hidden supermarket aisles, or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights celebrate failure and madness in the lives and labour of their female characters. By transforming historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of resistance as well as spectacular failure, these performances of excess, from dieting to devouring, precarity to privilege, force audiences to confront cultural blind spots and failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality. Furthermore, by bridging contemporary women’s anger research with whiteness and affect studies, this essay identifies a nascent trend in US theatre with a growing international profile that engages an updated absurdist rubric within a larger feminist praxis of political revolt.

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

The Philosophy of Dissimilation, Meaninglessness and Isolation in Theatre of the Absurd: Evidence from John Ruganda’s Two Plays

Drama and theatrical performance remain one of the most effective ways through which life’s reality can be experienced, described, perceived and portrayed. Absurd drama has come to be seen as one of the most modern literary movements that have been adopted by African playwrights, Ruganda included. Based on a study of plays by Ugandan playwright John Ruganda, this paper discusses the philosophy of dissimilation, meaninglessness and isolation in theatre of the absurd. The study used Ruganda’s two plays, namely The Floods and Shreds of Tenderness. The various modes through which absurd drama appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities were examined. The study employed descriptive research and used purposive sampling. Data was analysed qualitatively by describing the findings of the study to arrive at inferences and conclusions. In Ruganda’s plays, the country is represented as being sick and in dire need of an urgent remedy but no one has the desire to bring in a solution to it. The sickness has not only affected the people as individuals but the nation as a whole. The playwright is by extension pointing to the cause of the sickness affecting the nation as being attributed to bad leadership. Using the lives of main characters, the playwright also demonstrates the senselessness of the human life and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. The characters are portrayed as isolated and lonely individuals whose lives and fate area mere subject of time. The finding of the study is an important contribution to understanding drama and the changing trend in literary criticism in drama

L’impact du théâtre de l’absurde français sur le théâtre irakien Taha Salem et sa pièce "Tantale " comme modèle

This paper examines the influence of the French Theatre of the Absurd on the Iraqi theater. The Iraqi playwright Taha Salem with his play "Tantal" have been chosen as a model. To reach this goal, three main points have been tackled: the first is devoted to briefly presenting the creation of the French Theatre of the Absurd, the second aims at uncovering the reasons for receiving this new theatrical form by some Iraqi playwrights, the third point focuses on analyzing the theatrical text of the Iraqi writer Taha Salem. Moreover, this analysis is based on studying three axes: the form, the linguistic structure, and the privacy of the characters of the play.

Semiotic Analysis of Roland Barthes on Wardah Advertisement Version “I Face of Indonesia”

This article is an attempt to focus on Interior by Maeterlinck in the light of Absurd tradition. Maeterlinck employed symbols to illuminate nature, spirituality, existence, and the innumerable and invisible forces that shape our existence. Maeterlinck uses symbolism to explore the theme of death that is omnipotent in everyday life. The Interior 's central theme is death. Maeterlinck generates suspense by juxtaposing the characters' uneasiness in the garden with the family's peace and ignorance within the house. In order to reach this aim, the researchers decide to explain the theatre of the Absurd and its elements. Maeterlinck distrust of language is shown in his distrust of words, using repetitions, silences, pauses and some other tactics. The existential theme and contents used in selected play are discussed. Themes such as: death, lack of individuality and lack of communication in mentioned play is discussed. Moreover, this article also contains a comparative study of the structure of the two.

The Tragic Sense in The Theatre of The Absurd: The Case of Pinter's Birthday Party

Abstract
 Absurdity is one of the prominent philosophy associated with the emergence of modernist and postmodernist movement in literary text. In such texts, we notice that the embedded themes and ideas reflect the dilemma and the suffering of modern man. The purpose of this paper is an attempt to clarify the subtle feeling associates with the appearance of modernist and postmodernist movements, discussing the ideas of absurdity and absolutism. Also, it gives an idea about the sense of sickness associates with the anomalies of the human conduct on the projected scene such as a universe of meta--identity, named the hilarious theater. This type of theatre is commonly known as absurd theater as discovered by Martin Julius Esslin (1918-2002), who created this phrase to explain Meta identity has been substantially reinterpreted through an exterior identity mask, which invigorates one of the postmodern ideological conceptions of the enormous humanity. The paper consists of three sections: the first is an introduction to Pinter's Birthday Party. The second section discusses the concept of absurdity and the reason of its emergence. The third section deals with how absurd themes reflect the pain, the sense of loss and void that modern man experiences amid the chaotic world specifically after WWII. Finally, the study ends up with conclusion and recommendations for further studies

Comedy’s Double Negation of Meaning in Post-war European Theater

Through selected close readings from plays by Arthur Adamov and Samuel Beckett, this article examines how language is herein used against itself to expose the impossibility of meaninglessness. By replacing significance with mere surface sounds, language emerges from these plays as a carrier of unexpected—and inescapable—meaning. Tracing a series of comic reversal techniques common to both Adamov and Beckett, famously grouped together under the moniker Theater of the Absurd, the author demonstrates how the attempt to deprive words of sense-making is repetitiously usurped by other sensory elements which doggedly invest the striving for senselessness with profound ambiguity, against all odds.