ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The playwrights most often associated with the movement are Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. The early plays of Edward Albee and Harold Pinter fit into this classification, but these dramatists have also written plays that move far away from the Theater of the Absurd’s basic elements.

Detailed explanation-2: -But in theatre the word ‘absurdism’ is often used more specifically, to refer to primarily European drama written in the 1950s and 1960s by writers including Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter, often grouped together as ‘the theatre of the absurd’, a phrase coined by the critic Martin Esslin.

Detailed explanation-3: -The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair.

Detailed explanation-4: -Absurdity which is, according to Beckett, the essence of human existence, is the main way he uses in order to depict the emptiness and alienation in the modern world. Further-more, centering upon silences and repetitions, Beckett doesn’t follow a traditional theatrical form and procedure in writing his plays.

Detailed explanation-5: -Samuel Beckett: the big one As the father of absurdist theatre, no examination of the form can take place without looking to Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright known for Endgame and his most famous and successful play, Waiting for Godot.