The Theatre Of The Absurd: A Dramatic Revolution Anonymous

During a time of the utmost rationality, when the serious nature of man was exposed in its most raw form, Samuel Beckett-- author of Endgame --- tackled subject matters that stepped out from under the issue of war and the tangible problems of his era, and instead chose to focus on more abstract topics, oftentimes with an emphasis on existentialist ideals. Beckett, as influential as any writer of his time period, played a vital role in the formation of the avant-garde movement know as the Theatre of the Absurd, an unincorporated group of playwrights whose work mainly took place from the late 1940's through the 1960's. Among those who are also classified as "absurdists" are Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter, men with similar styles and equally comparable philosophies, intellectuals that believed, "man is inhabiting a universe with which he is out of key. Its meaning is indecipherable and his place within it is without purpose. He is bewildered, troubled and obscurely threatened" (Esslin.43). This existentialist view is found throughout Endgame, and echoed in Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, in which, similarly to Beckett, the author writes dialogue in a repetitive,...