Layer II
A reference to the people, plays, and ideas of the Absurd.
Playwright · 1906–1989
Irish-born, Paris-based. Former assistant to James Joyce; fought in the French Resistance. Wrote Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961). Nobel Prize in Literature, 1969. His theatre pares drama down to bodies, voices, and silence.
Playwright · 1909–1994
Romanian-French. Called his first play, The Bald Soprano (1950), an 'anti-play.' Followed with The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), and Rhinoceros (1959). Elected to the Académie française in 1970.
Playwright · 1910–1986
Orphan, thief, and prisoner turned poet. Sartre championed him in Saint Genet (1952). Plays include The Maids (1947), The Balcony (1957), The Blacks (1959), and The Screens (1961) — ritual theatres of role-play, power, and illusion.
Playwright · 1908–1970
Russian-Armenian French dramatist. Early works like Professor Taranne (1953) are dreamlike absurdist pieces; he later turned toward Brechtian political theatre.
Playwright · 1930–2008
British heir to Beckett. The Birthday Party (1958) and The Homecoming (1965) made 'the Pinter pause' and menacing everyday talk famous. Nobel Prize, 2005.
Playwright · 1905–1980
Philosopher of existentialism: 'existence precedes essence.' His play No Exit (1944) — 'Hell is other people' — dramatizes ideas in conventional form, a key contrast to the Absurdists.
Playwright · 1913–1960
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) defines the absurd as the clash between our need for meaning and the world's silence. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'
Play · 1953
Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a tree for a Godot who never arrives. Vivian Mercier quipped it is a play in which 'nothing happens, twice.'
Play · 1950
Ionesco's anti-play built from the empty sentences of an English-language primer. There is no bald soprano. The ending loops back to the beginning.
Play · 1957
Hamm, blind and chair-bound, and his servant Clov in a bare room at the end of the world. Nagg and Nell live in dustbins.
Play · 1947
Sisters Claire and Solange take turns playing their mistress in a murderous ritual — theatre about the performance of class and self.
Concept · 1961
Term coined by critic Martin Esslin in his book of that name. Not a self-declared movement but a shared tendency: dramatizing the absurdity of the human condition through form itself.
Concept · 1940s
Philosophy holding that individuals create meaning through choice in an indifferent universe. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir.
Concept · —
Clichés, non sequiturs, repetition, and silence reveal speech as habit rather than communication. Lucky's monologue in Godot is the canonical example.
Concept · —
Absurdist plays often end where they began, refusing the classical arc of rising action and resolution.