What is absurdist theater?

Absurd theatre is one of the modern theater genres. The word "absurd," derived from the Latin sardus (deaf), refers philosophically to an individual's disconnection from his or her environment. The term "Absurdist Theatre" was first used in the 1962 book The Absurdist Theatre by British theatre critic Martin Aisling as a generalization of the work of such playwrights as S. Beckett, E. Unescu, A. Adamov, J. Genet, and H. Pinter, who appeared in Europe in the 1950s.

One of the most influential genres in Western theater after World War II. It emerged in France, and in the 1950s plays by playwrights such as Unescu, Beckett, Adamov, and Genet were staged on the Parisian theater stage.

These playwrights, under the influence of surrealist literature popularized in the 1920s, especially under the influence of Aalto's theory of drama, broke the traditional drama writing method and created a number of unique plays from content to form. Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a typical masterpiece of absurdist theater.

Expanded information:

Talking about the absurdity of life has long been seen in ancient Western theater. Since the beginning of Greek tragedy, there has been an aspect in the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus that expresses concern about the cruelty and absurdity of human destiny and the human condition.The existentialist literary figures and dramatists of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in many of their novels and plays, revealed the absurdity of human existence from the point of view of reason.

The absurdist dramatists went further to express their strong resentment and deep satire on the absurdity of life. In order to reveal the irrationality of the world, the groundlessness and irrationality of existence, and the insignificance of human life as low as a mole cricket, they expressed it not only with the help of words but also with the help of all kinds of stage means, so as to dramatize the absurdity itself.

In order to express the absurdity of life, they arbitrarily destroyed, fragmented, and cut off the traditional structure of the theater, and removed all the traditional elements of the theater, such as action, language, and characters. Absurdist drama generally has no specific plot, no characters in line with the objective reality, the entire stage is nothing more than a symbol to highlight the absurdity of the world.