Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett are two of the biggest exponents of The Theatre of the Absurd. Both of their works present a world which cannot be logically explained, where the scenery, the language and the actions of the characters are almost incomprehensible and do not comply with the previously accepted norms of theatre.
J.L Styan writes about Pinter. "His audience is made to feel, through an exquisite friction of nightmare and normality, the earthly need for security" (The Dark Comedy)
I think this quote applies to Beckett too, however.
Both of the plays I will look at are very sinister, subversive plays, riddled with dark humour. What is important to remember is that the plays are not just absurd for the sake of being pretentious, which I have to admit was my first opinion about the plays, it is important to remember that this mode of theatre is a reaction to realist theatre. Also, the incomprehensibility of the plays is another way of looking at the human condition and the idea of the irrationality of experience (adapted from the Penguin book of literary terms)
The idea of an actual ending in these plays is problematic.
" (Beckett) trades in plot, characterisation and a final solution, for a series of concrete stage images" (http://dana.nau.edu) Although they have endings, neither play really has a conclusion. This is one of the most prominent features of theatre of the absurd, the way in which the ending isn't clear-cut leaves the audience feeling somewhat uneasy.
In The birthday Party, Pinter builds up tension tremendously well throughout the play merely through the interaction between the characters. We are first introduced to the rather absent minded character of Me...
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.... The idea of friendship and reliance is also important in determining how we view. By the end, their incoherent speeches begin to make sense as we begin to tune into their world, of course we are left with many unanswered questions, as in The Birthday Party but feel that the conclusion has been coming, the whole play seems to have been one long dealy to an inevitable conclusion.
Bibliography
Styan, J.L. (1962) The Dark Comedy, The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy. Cambridge University Press.
Clifford Davidson et al Eds. (1984) Drama in the Twentieth Century, Comparative and Critical essays. Ams press Inc.
(No authorial name given) Http://dana.nau.edu/-sek5/classpage.html. Accessed on December 9th 2003.
(No Authorial name given) www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck. Accessed on December 9th 2003.
Firstly let us consider conflict. In each act of the play, we see the overpowering desire to belong leading to a climax of conflict amongst the characters, which has the consequence of exclusion. Conflict is a successful literary technique, as it engages the audience and focuses our attention on the issue of conflict and exclusion, brought about by the characters’ desires to be accepted by their community.
Pellegrini, Ann. “The Plays of Paula Vogel.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Ed. David Krasner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 473-84.
In conclusion I think that the stage directions and dramatic irony are significant to the play, and without them there would be no need for a lot of the events that happen in the play.
Werner, Craig, Thomas J. Taylor and Robert McClenaghan. Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition: James Baldwin. April 2003. .
...ing something that they had either experienced or had a family member experience. As a result, it caused them to identify with the play. The manner in which this play has been configured such that it is drawing on the predatory and imperialistic tendencies displayed by multinational conglomerates provides a way for today's audience to identify with the plight of the characters and their realm.
To begin with I believe it is important to clarify what I mean by comedy and then see if both plays conform to the conventions of a Shakespearean comedy.
Alan Bennett presents his characters in Talking Heads by writing the plays in the form of monologue. By employing this technique he has managed to create a rich and detailed World in which his stories unfold but, he only allows us to see it through the eyes of a single narrator. When reading a play that is presented in this manner it is possible to lose sight of the fact that you are only getting one person’s version of events and you may start to believe that you are having conversations reported to you verbatim. This is a clever mechanism because the narrators can often be unreliable and lead the reader to form opinions and draw conclusions that quite often turn out to be unfounded and false. The term “Talking heads is a synonym in television for boredom” (Bennett, 2007, p, 10) yet, these talking heads are certainly not boring, the settings may be drab and ordinary, the characters are not exciting or inspiring yet, the gossipy way in which the stories are told hooks the reader in. Fitting neatly into the genre of tragicomedy it is perhaps fitting that the ‘tragic’ comes before the ‘comedy’, certainly the dramatist infuses the plays with a rich dose of humour but the melancholy subject matter and the often quite sad and lonely characters always counter balances the laughs with a tinge of sadness.
The discussion of play-within-a-play makes us think; what counts as good theatre? What does it take for us to act on a play? Can anyone watch and understand the art of theatre, with elements of parody in it? These questions provide very sparse answers, but through the parody of Pyramus and Thisbe and also Romeo and Juliet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare has shown us a parody of what a bad theatre is itself. These parodies show that the play requires deep understanding of the art of theatre in order for it to be enjoyed fully.
After the morbid, post-war anxieties of the 1940s, Samuel Beckett sparked a new generation of expressionism in drama, known today as the Theatre of the Absurd. Distorting reality into a grotesque mixture of emotional grief and physical despair, this genre was accentuated by the way Beckett abused the concept of time. He conveyed characters lost in their melancholy, drawing them through the use of repetitive one-liners and slow neurotic musings. Perhaps the best example of Beckett bending time comes from his 1958 masterpiece Endgame.
Gainor, J. Ellen., Stanton B. Garner, and Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama, Shorter Edition. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors are vastly different plays as one is a tragedy and the other a comedy. Though the fact that they were written by the same author shows up in both. Happy endings and plays within plays are demonstrated in both of these works but at the end of the day their genre keeps them extremely separate from each other.
The play defies easy definition and various critics have labeled it variously as absurdist, existentialist, comical, burlesque, metaphorical or grim. The playwright on the other hand maintained that all through the creation of his work he strove to bring in the comic element and any tragedy that seems part of the play, may have crept in inadvertently and whenever it has been staged as a serious play, audience reaction to it has been cold.
As one of the significant literary figures of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett left his mark on literature with his unique contribution ranging from prose to poetry. Although Beckett's oeuvre has been subject to innumerable analysis from divergent perspectives and various approaches, screen adaptations of his stage plays are unfortunately neglected, and thereby less scrutinized.
Comedy and tragedy are two totally opposing genres but both have been very successful during the Elizabethan period. Several plays were written to help people to be instructed in a general way and to purge their emotions through the laughing in comedy or the crying in the tragedy. Among the writers of tragic plays, there was Shakespeare with one of his most famous play The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Regarding comedy, John Lyly takes the myth of Endymion in his courtly comedy Endymion, the Man in the Moon. Starting from these two plays this essay will look at the boundaries that allow defining and distinguishing between tragedy and comedy as well as their importance at the time. Tragedy and comedy stand out mainly by the fact that one of these genres makes people cry and the other makes them laugh. The boundary between the two is not always easy to distinguish, since a play can be considered as a comedy without being funny, simply because it has a happy ending. The issue here is to contrast these two genres to better draw the border between them.
This absurdist drama develops between the lines and in the audience’s imagination. Pinter deliberately departs from the conventional theatrical dialogue and speech pattern to make a communication gap between the character and the audience. His character’s colloquial speech consists of disjoined and ambivalent conversations, punctuated with resonant silence. The characters with their speech, hesitation, pauses not only depict their own alienation but also bring our several under-layers of meanings. Dialogue is of central importance in Pinter’s plays and is perhaps the key to his originality. Self-consciously, Pinter invents his own language for the stage. His remark about the kind of theatrical language close to everyday speech-idiom and least infected with the wordiness of English stage, say the Shavian drama, is apposite