Write a note on Absurd Drama.

"The Theatre of the Absurd" is a phrase taken from Albert Camus's essay, "Le My the de Sisyphe"(The Myth of Sisyphus), which was written in 1949 in which Camus defined the Absurd Drama as "The tension which emerges from man's determination to discover purpose and order in a world which steadfastly refuses to evidence either." The Absurd Drama is the drama that deals with the absurdities and inescapable ills of life. This was probably coined in English by Martin Esslin who wrote the book, "The Theatre of the Absurd" to popularize the Absurdist drama.


              Martin Esslin says that it is a term applied to a group of dramatists in the 1950s who did not regard themselves as a school, but who all seemed to share certain attitudes towards the predicament of the man in the universe. The major dramatists of this group are Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter and so on.


               Absurd Drama has certain basic characteristics :
    1. Absurd Drama is the drama which treats human life and human situation as absurd, unfit and foolish.
   2. The Absurd Drama shows things rationally and not romantically.
   3. This type of drama is found absurd or awkward or queer in the very conception of the dramatic story as well as of its technique.
   4. It is distinctly different from regular tragedy and comedy in its plot, plot-construction, art of characterization, conception of dramatic situation and even of dialogue.
    5. There is no fixed individual identities.
    6. The theme of nothingness is the principal theme of this type of drama.
    7. The time, space, setting, and atmosphere are found to be absurd.


          Ionesco's conception of Absurd Drama:
 Absurd Drama "is devoid of purpose.....cut off from his religious metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."