The Theatre of the Absurd grew as a response to what critics saw as the collapse of moral,

religious, political, and social structures in the twentieth century. The primary aim of its plays
was to point out the absurdity of life. Though it incorporated a diverse group of playwrights,
each with his or her own set of beliefs, many influenced by the Dadaist and surrealist
movements, in general, they agree that human life and endeavour had become so essentially
illogical, and language such an inadequate form of communication, that the only refuge was
laughter. In absurdist plays, all truth becomes relative, and life is reduced to an illusion, to
highlight the absurdity and hopelessness of the world.

Martin Esslin defines the movement as striving to “express its sense of the senselessness of
the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of
rational devices and discursive thought.” His explanation continues, “The Theatre of the
Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents
it in being”, which separates this theatre movement from existentialism, just as experience is
different from theory.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is generally considered to be at the forefront of the
absurdist movement. Beckett conveys a sense of the hopelessness and absurdity of modern
life in his depiction of two men passing time, as they vainly wait for the title character to
arrive. The play is not a story about life, but rather the condition of living, being itself a
metaphor for what Beckett saw as the mental state of twentieth century life. The apparent
simplicity of the play is deceptive, for the text can be read at multiple levels and is densely
filled with visual and linguistic symbolism, drawing on Freudian psychology, Christian
mythology, and various philosophical outlooks. Beckett calls the play a “tragicomedy,”
through which he wants to suggest that since life is so tragic and impossible to comprehend,
laughter might be the only sane response to it.

Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano has even greater elements of burlesque humour than
Beckett, as Ionesco exposes the inanities within commonplace behaviour and thought. The
“well-made play” is parodied as being conventionally predictable and innately stereotypical
in character and plot. Feeling that the absurdity of modern existence cannot be communicated
intellectually, Ionesco makes his audience sense and feel it through the experience of a play
that mocks those who believe in causality, and exposes the meaninglessness and irrationality
of people’s lives and relationships in its presentation of characters whose inability to
communicate leads them to dehumanize themselves and others. Although the experimental
nature of his plays allies him to the surrealists, his work is not fully surreal in that it is never
entirely divorced from reality.

As a typical absurdist drama, there is little plot to The Bald Soprano; the action contradicts
the words just as the words continuously contradict the action, so we are never sure of
anything. We meet the Smiths, who have a number of confusing conversations, and are
joined by a possibly married couple, the Martins, for dinner. All four continue in increasingly
nonsensical debates, momentarily interrupted by a fire chief in search of a fire, and end in a
hostile standoff, before the Martins assume the identities of the Smiths and the play begins
again from where it started.

Important contributions, to the theatre of the Absurd, usually emphasizing the irrationality of
the world and the illogic of human behaviour, and often harshly comic in tone, also came
from lonesco, Albee, and other dramatists, as well as Beckett himself in subsequent years.
Critics and scholars also consider Simpson and Harold Pinter, the author of The Birthday
Party and The Dumb Waiter as playwrights who wrote plays that belonged to the Theatre of
the Absurd; but it was always more a European than a British phenomenon.