“The Theater of the Absurd” has become a much-used and abused slogan. What does that represent? And how can such a label be justified? It might be better to try to answer the second question first. There is no organized movement, no school of artists who claim this label. Many playwrights classified under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theater of the Absurd, will respond with indignation that they do not belong to such a movement, and rightly so. Because each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express neither more nor less their personal vision of the world. Yet such critical concepts are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art, arise. When the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet and Adamov first appeared on stage, they intrigued and outraged most critics and audiences. And it's no wonder. These plays flout every standard by which theater has been judged for many centuries; they must therefore appear as a provocation to people who come to the theater in the hope of finding there what they would recognize as a well-made play. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay A well-made play is supposed to present well-observed and convincingly motivated characters: these plays often contain virtually no recognizable human beings . and present completely unmotivated actions. A well-made play is meant to entertain through the ding-dong of witty, logically constructed dialogue: in some of these plays, the dialogue seems to have degenerated into meaningless chatter. A well-made play is supposed to have a well-tied beginning, middle, and ending: these plays often begin at an arbitrary point and seem to end just as arbitrarily. By all traditional standards of critical appreciation of drama, these plays are not only abominably bad, they do not even deserve the name drama. And yet, curiously, these plays worked, they had an effect, they exerted a fascination of their own for the theater. It was initially said that this fascination was nothing more than a scandalous success, that people flocked to see Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Ionesco's The Bald Primadonna simply because it had become fashionable to express their indignation and their astonishment during the holidays. But this explanation could obviously only apply to one or two pieces of this kind. And the success of a whole series of equally unconventional works became increasingly evident. If the critical criteria of conventional theater did not apply to these plays, it must surely be due to a difference in objective, to the use of different artistic means, to the fact, in short, that these plays created and applied to both a different vision. convention of drama. It is just as foolish to condemn an ​​abstract painting because it lacks perspective or a recognizable subject as it is to dismiss Waiting for Godot because it has no plot to speak of. By painting a composition of squares and lines, an artist like Mondrian does not want to represent any object in nature, he does not want to create perspective. Likewise, in writing Waiting for Godot, Beckett did not intend to tell a story, he did not want the audience to go home convinced that they knew the solution to the problem posed in the play. It is therefore no use reproaching him for not doing what he never sought to do; the only reasonable solution is to try to find out what his intentions were. However, if we approached themdirectly, most of the playwrights in question would refuse to discuss the theories or purposes behind their work. They would rightly point out that they are only concerned with one thing: expressing their vision of the world as best they can, quite simply because as artists, they feel an irrepressible desire to do so. This is where the critic can intervene. By describing the works which do not fit into the established convention, by highlighting the similarities of approach of a certain number of new works more or less obviously related, by analyzing the nature of their method and their artistic effect, he can attempt to define the framework of the new convention and, in doing so, may provide the standards by which it will become possible to meaningfully compare and evaluate the works of that convention. The burden of proof for the existence of such a convention clearly rests with the critic, but if he can establish that there are fundamental similarities in the approaches, he can argue that these similarities must arise from common factors in the experience of the writers concerned. And these common factors must in turn come from the spiritual climate of our time (from which no sensitive artist can escape) and also perhaps from a common background of artistic influences, from a similarity of roots, from a tradition shared. A term like Theater of the Absurd must therefore be understood as a kind of intellectual shorthand denoting a complex pattern of similarities in approach, method and conventions, of shared philosophical and artistic premises, conscious or subconscious, and of influences of a common reserve of tradition. Such a label is therefore an aid to understanding, valid only to the extent that it allows us to better understand a work of art. This is not a binding classification; it is certainly not global or exclusive. A play may contain certain elements that can be better understood in light of such a label, while other elements of the same play derive from and can be better understood in light of a different convention. Arthur Adamov, for example, wrote a number of plays that are excellent examples of the Theater of the Absurd. He now openly and consciously rejects this style and writes according to a different, realistic convention. However, even his later plays, both realistic and socially engaged, contain certain aspects that can still be elucidated in terms of Theater of the Absurd (such as the use of symbolic interludes, puppets, in his play Spring 71). Furthermore, once defined and understood, a term like Theater of the Absurd acquires a certain value in illuminating the works of previous eras. The Polish critic Jan Kott, for example, wrote a brilliant study of King Lear in light of Beckett's Endgame. And that this was not a vain academic exercise but a real aid to understanding is demonstrated by the fact that Peter Brook's great production of King Lear took many of its ideas from Kott's essay. What then is the convention of the drama which has now acquired the label of the Theater of the Absurd? Let us take as a starting point one of the pieces in this volume: Amédée by Ionesco. A middle-aged husband and wife are depicted in a situation that is clearly not taken from real life. They haven't left their apartment in years. The woman earns her living by operating a sort of telephone switchboard; husband writes a play, but never gets past the first few lines. There is a corpse in the room. It has been there for many years. It may be the body of the woman's lover whom the husband killed when he found them together, but this is by no means certain; he.