The Theatre Of The Absurd (Plays and Playwrights) - Softcover

Esslin, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0413760502 ISBN 13: 9780413760500

Publisher: Methuen Drama, 2001

Synopsis

Hamm: We're not beginning ... to ... to ... mean something?
Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something?
(from 'Endgame' by Samuel Beckett)

Martin Esslin coined the phrase 'Theatre of the Absurd' in this ground-breaking book, and the term has become part of the language just as this book has become an indispensable part of any literature and drama library: the definitive study of the playwrights who have dramatised the fundamental absurdity of the human condition. In this readable and illuminating work - still a classic of theatre studies - Esslin shows how Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter and others have confronted a world in which there is no communication and where man flounders in a void, cut off from his roots and shorn of all certainties."A seminal work" (Independent)
"An exciting and stimulating book, a very useful reference work and a standard textbook" (Literary Review)

About this title

From the Inside Flap

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.

About the Author

Martin Esslin was born in Budapest and educated in Austria. He read Philosophy and English at Vienna University and graduated as a producer from the Reinhardt Seminar, the well-known dramatic academy. He left Austria in 1938 and in 1940 began working for the BBC as a producer, scriptwriter, and broadcaster. In 1963 he became Head of Radio Drama at the BBC, a position he held until his retirement in 1977. At his death in 2002 at the age of 83 he was Emeritus Professor of Drama at Stanford University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0413760502
• ISBN 13: 9780413760500
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 480