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Theatre of the Absurd
Theater of the Absurd refers to a literary movement in drama popular throughout European countries from the 1940s to approximately 1989. The phrase ‘Absurd Drama’ or ‘The Theatre of Absurd’ gained currency after Martin Esslin’s book ‘The Theatre of Absurd’ was published in 1961. Absurdist playwrights adhered to the theories of French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, in particular his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942. In this essay, Camus introduced his Philosophy of the Absurd, in which he argues that man's quest for meaning and truth is a futile endeavor; he compares man's struggle to understand the world and the meaning of life to Sisyphus, a famous figure in Greek Mythology condemned to an existence of rolling a heavy stone up a mountain only to watch it roll to the bottom. By ‘Absurd’, Camus meant a life lived solely for its stake in a universe which no longer made sense because there was no God to resolve the contradictions. In other words, what Camus calle...