In the second half of the twentieth century, a new theatre was born, it was the birth
of a new theatrical art, not its revival. In the 50's and 60's on the stage of small
Parisian theatres of the Latin Quarter appear very strange plays. These plays
challenged not only the centuries-old traditions of playwrights but also common
sense. Indeed, Eugène Ionesco's plays challenged common sense, epitheted the
reader. Instead of the traditional dramaturgical action of tying, culminating and
unleashing, sometimes nothing happened on stage and the action was presented
astonishingly illogical and absurd. Instead of traditional psychological images were
comic characters - puppets, clowns ... In the plays, the traditional stage speech
disappears, and instead of dialogues, there is mooing instead of dick sounds. They
weren't bad plays - they weren't plays at all. One of the founders of the theatre of
absurdity, Eugène Ionesco, defines the genre of his work as an antipiece. It was
quite natural that the theatrical public did not understand and criticize these stage
works. It was much harder to explain the triumph, the acceptance of these works. It
can be noted that the absurdists themselves never united in groups, did not write
joint manifestoes and insistently stressed the personal poetic consciousness. At the
same time, they have something in common - namely the degradation and
destruction of language, a combination of tragedy and buffonade, a common
atmosphere that owned these plays.
This phenomenon has many synonymous, relevant terms - it is sometimes called a
nihilistic theatre, a theatre of silence, a theatre of paradox. The theatre of the
absurd vinicus at a time of deep crisis of humanistic ideals and ideas of post-war
Europe. At this time, the whole world was divided into two camps - the first was
repelling the intelligentsia with its bourgeois practicality, while the second was
frightening the growing ghost of communist totalitarianism. Man is perceived by
the authors as an absurdist as some helpless lonely creature, thrown into this
senseless, absurd world in which there are no values, no ideals. The aesthetics of
absurdists emerged from the philosophy of existentialism. Many researchers talk
about many common ideological-philosophical views. Whether they really took as
a starting point of their creative manner the ideas of existentialism apologists as a
basis, but they went further in the development of the main problem, issues of
existence, issues of existence. If existentialists put the main problem - the question
of choosing the hero, the hero of the theater of absurdity does not raise the
question, does not raise the question of the limits of what is allowed. The heroes of
the theater of absurdity accept the emptiness and uselessness of their existence as a
given and in the opinion of absurdists this acceptance and an attempt to understand
and explain the content of what is happening gives a person the right to happiness.
One of the main features is the lack of a core of dramatic conflict. Conflict as a
confrontation of two categories, two antagonists is possible only in a world where
there is a system of values (religious, political, moral). In a world where God died,
in a world where chaos and absurdity reigns, a conflict without content is
impossible.
Both Ionesco and Beckett said that there is no need for speech in the modern
world. It is not a means of understanding between people, but a barrier to human
understanding. This rejection by playwrights of the legitimacy of language gives
them the opportunity to shift their emphasis to other non-verbal stage means.
Pantomime, mime, becomes the main way of communication on stage. In most of
the absurdists' plays, most of the stage role is taken over by special effects. Instead
of the traditional dramaturgical development of the plot, the absurdists come to
some content images that can be called onirichnimy. It is as if the fears and fears of
the authors materialize on stage. Next in importance to understanding the poetics
of the works of absurdists is understanding of specific humour. Their plays
surprisingly combine the tragedy of human existence with comic and satirical
ridicule, and the buffonade itself. The author allows the viewer to abstract himself
from tragic and ridiculous situations and the viewer laughs as if he were laughing
at the absurdity of hope, the senselessness of expectations of characters.
The play "The Bald Singer" became popular with Ionesco. The title itself is quite
provocative because there is no such character in the work. The plot canvas of the
play is composed of dialogues between two English families, the Smith and the
Martins, who come to visit each other and communicate. The main characters in
action are not people, people cheat like dummies, they are completely automated, a
person loses his or her individuality. With the development of the plot, if in the
first part the characters exchange more or less coherent replicas then in the second
part they fully hear each other, each talking about something different, each talking
about his or her pain, about his or her experiences and each following replica does
NOT trace a "connection conversation. Ionesco shows the absolute homelessness
and loneliness of a person, a person cannot understand and know the depth of
another person's suffering, people are doomed to existential loneliness. does not represent the ability to understand and comprehend the world-the other. All the
absurdity and meaninglessness of further scenes can be understood from the words
with which the play begins - "Mr. Smith, an Englishman, in a futuristic English
chair and futuristic English shoes, smoking a futuristic English pipe and reading a
futuristic English newspaper in a futuristic English fireplace. He wears futuristic
English glasses, he has gray English mustaches. Next to him in a futuristic English
chair, Mrs. Smith, an Englishwoman, darns futuristic English socks. A long
English pause. A futuristic English watch on the wall reflects seventeen futuristic
English strikes. All the dialogues are full of conversations about something of their
own and evoke illusion and no understanding of reality, each sits in his chair, each
reads his newspaper and each voiced very untimely thoughts, impressed by its
senselessness and meaninglessness. Every next phrase or replica is increasingly
bewildering for the reader or viewer. This conscious trick that Ionesco critics have
used is called a terrorist language. He does this specifically to show the separation,
the loneliness of people in the family, in the state, in society, in the world. At the
head of the corner, the absurdist takes the idea of conveying the idea of
understanding the meaninglessness and absurdity of being. In my subjective
opinion, it is not enough just dramaturgical art to give absurd works of life.
Perhaps, based on the specific nature of this text, it is necessary to use the
possibilities of cinematography, animation in order to draw these intangible bodies
of people entering the room who become participants in this non-existent dialogue,
this attempt to make the process of life legitimate.
All of this appeals not only to a brilliant game, a director, a scriptwriter, and for
this there must be an equally brilliant viewer who will be able to see himself in
these meaningless scenes and dialogues, to see the person of the 21st century. who
is trying to find answers to her deep, ontological questions - why we came here,
why we are suffering, why we are experiencing these trials. The history of the
theatre of absurdity is as homelessness, as loneliness, as the helplessness of a man
in this discord of the world who is abandoned in the idol of earthly existence, in this short moment between life and death could have been created by such lonely
and strange people of French culture. Their otherness, their inability to find theirs
allowed them to speak with such ruthlessness about the tragedy of man in the
twentieth century.
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