The Theatre of the Absurd (PDF) (Print)

In 1953, Samuel BeckettÕs Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponentsÑBeckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and othersÑshattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their charactersÕ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition.