The Theatre of the Absurd by In 1953, Samuel Beckett's 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 proponents--Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others--shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters' 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. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin's landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett's tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.
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Theatre in the Modern World:
Not long after the start of the 20th Century, playwrights, influenced by the horrors of war, began to experiment with theatre in a way which depicted many of the long held historical, social and cultural beliefs and practices as meaningless and chaotic. Incorporating interviews with influential director Bijan Sheibani and other key figures, this film traces the evolution of modern theatre from its Existentialist roots through Absurdism to Realism via the works of Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter and even the writers of Coronation Street.
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A sample bibliography for 3 resources suggested on this page would look like:
Hinchliffe, A 1969, The Absurd, Methuen, London.
Hornby, R. (2015) ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, Hudson Review, 67(4), pp. 640–646. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=100738517&site=lrc-live (Accessed: 25 October 2018).
Theatre of the Absurd 2018. Britannica School. Retrieved 25 October 2018, from https://school.eb.com.au/levels/high/article/Theatre-of-the-Absurd/3408#
