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The Theatre Of The Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd (french: théâtre de l'absurde ) is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence. Etymology Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "The Theatre of the Absurd", which begins by focusing on the playwrights Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco. Esslin says that their plays have a common denominator — the "absurd", a word that Esslin defines with a quotation from Ionesco: "absurd is th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
En Attendant Godot, Festival D'Avignon, 1978
En or EN may refer to: Businesses * Bouygues (stock symbol EN) * Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway (reporting mark EN, but now known as Southern Railway of Vancouver Island) * Euronews, a news television and internet channel Language and writing * En or N, the 14th letter of the Roman alphabet * EN (cuneiform), the mark in Sumerian cuneiform script for a High Priest or Priestess meaning "lord" or "priest" * En (Cyrillic) (Н, н), a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, equivalent to the Roman letter "n" * En (digraph), ‹en› used as a phoneme * En (typography), a unit of width in typography ** en dash, a dash one en long * En language, a language spoken in northern Vietnam * English language (ISO 639-1 language code en) Organisations * Eastern National, a US organization providing educational products to National Park visitors * English Nature, a former UK government conservation agency * Envirolink Northwest, an environmental organization in England Religion * En (deity) in Albania ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Well-made Play
The well-made play (french: la pièce bien faite, pronounced ) is a dramatic genre from nineteenth-century theatre, developed by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. It is characterised by concise plotting, compelling narrative and a largely standardised structure, with little emphasis on characterisation and intellectual ideas. Scribe, a prolific playwright, wrote several hundred plays between 1815 and 1861, usually in collaboration with co-authors. His plays, breaking free from the old neoclassical style of drama seen at the Comédie Française, appealed to the theatre-going middle classes. The "well-made" form was adopted by other French and foreign playwrights and remained a key feature of the theatre well into the 20th century. Among later playwrights drawing on Scribe's formula were Alexandre Dumas ''fils'', Victorien Sardou and Georges Feydeau in France, W. S. Gilbert, Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, and Alan Ayckbourn in Britain, and Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macbett
''Macbett'' (1972) is Eugène Ionesco's satire on Shakespeare's ''Macbeth''. Plot Two generals, Macbett and Banco, put down a rebellion. In payment for their heroic service, Archduke Duncan promises to bestow on them land, titles and cash, but he reneges on the deal. Encouraged by the seductive Lady Duncan, Macbett plots to assassinate the Archduke and crown himself King. He tries to maintain his tenuous grip on the throne through a vicious cycle of murder and bloodshed. Meanwhile, he is haunted by the ghosts of his victims and discovers that his new wife is not all that she seems. Themes Written during the Cold War, Ionesco's ''Macbett'' remoulds Shakespeare's ''Macbeth'' into a comic tale of ambition, corruption, cowardice and excess, creating a tragic farce Farce is a comedy that seeks to entertain an audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, ridiculous, absurd, and improbable. Farce is also characterized by heavy use of physical humor; the use ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the " Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endgame (play)
''Endgame'', by Samuel Beckett, is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play about a blind, paralyzed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents and his doddering, dithering, harried, servile companion in an abandoned shack in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who mention their awaiting some unspecified “end” which seems to be the end of their relationship, death, and the end of the actual play itself. Much of the play’s content consists of terse, back and forth dialogue between the characters reminiscent of bantering, along with trivial stage actions; the plot is held together by the development of a grotesque story-within-a-story the character Hamm is writing. An aesthetically profound part of the play is the way the story-within-story and the actual play come to an end at roughly the same time. The play’s title refers to chess and frames the characters as acting out a losing battle with each other or their fate. It was originally written in French (entitled ''Fin de partie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tragicomedy
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragedy, tragic and comedy, comic forms. Most often seen in drama, dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a serious play with a happy ending. Tragicomedy, as its name implies, invokes the intended response of both the tragedy and the comedy in the audience, the former being a genre based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis and the latter being a genre intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter. In theatre Classical precedent There is no concise formal definition of tragicomedy from the classical antiquity, classical age. It appears that the Greek philosopher Aristotle had something like the Renaissance meaning of the term (that is, a serious action with a happy ending) in mind when, in ''Poetics (Aristotle), Poetics'', he discusses tragedy with a dual ending. In this respect, a number of An ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Tardieu
Jean Tardieu (born in Saint-Germain-de-Joux, Ain, 1 November 1903, died in Créteil, Val-de-Marne, 27 January 1995) was a French artist, musician, poet and dramatic author. Life and career He earned a degree in literature and worked for a publishing house. He published several poetry collections in the 1930s before starting to write for the stage. After World War II, Tardieu entered the world of radio and worked his way to head of dramatic programming and then director of programs at France-Music. The quality and success of French National Public Radio after World War II has been attributed largely to Jean Tardieu. He was married to pteridologist Marie Laure Tardieu. Tardieu's works mingled with the ideals of the French New Theatre and used comedy to pick apart more traditional theatre. He is often associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. Some of his work has been translated into English, including: * ''The Underground Lovers, and other experimental plays'' * ''Going...Goin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boris Vian
Boris Vian (; 10 March 1920 – 23 June 1959) was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer who is primarily remembered for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their release due to their unconventional outlook. Vian's other fiction, published under his real name, featured a highly individual writing style with numerous made-up words, subtle wordplay and surrealistic plots. His novel '' Froth on the Daydream'' (''L'Écume des jours'') is the best known of these works and one of the few translated into English. Vian was an important influence on the French jazz scene. He served as liaison for Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in Paris, wrote for several French jazz-reviews ('' Le Jazz Hot'', ''Paris Jazz'') and published numerous articles dealing with jazz both in the United States and in France. His o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III ( ; March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as ''The Zoo Story'' (1958), '' The Sandbox'' (1959), ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' (1962), '' A Delicate Balance'' (1966), and ''Three Tall Women'' (1994). Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play. His works are often considered frank examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. His middle period comprised plays that explored the psychology of maturing, marriage, and sexual relationships. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's mix ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Felicia Hardison Londré
Felicia Hardison Londré (born April 1, 1941) is Curators’ Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC).Londré, Felicia Mae Hardison." In Marquis ''Who’s Who in America'', 2013. She specializes in 19th and 20th-century American, French, and Russian theatre history, as well as in Shakespearean dramaturgy.Fisher, James, ed. ''To Have or Have Not; Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modern Theatre.'' McFarland & Co., Jefferson, NC: 2011. p. 297 Early life Londré was born in Fort Lewis, Washington, to Col. Felix M. Hardison and his wife Priscilla Mae (Graham) Hardison in 1941. She attended the University of Montana, where she earned a B.A. in French with a minor in drama, following which she received a Fulbright grant to study for one year at the University of Caen in Normandy.Canfield, Thomas. "Spotlight Article on Felicia Londré". KC Stage, September 2012. She completed her M.A. at the University of Washington in Romance Languages (also with a minor in d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fernando Arrabal
Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist, and poet. He was born in Melilla and settled in France in 1955. Regarding his nationality, Arrabal describes himself as "desterrado", or "half-expatriate, half-exiled". Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films and has published over 100 plays; 14 novels; 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artists' books; several essays; and his notorious "Letter to General Franco" during the dictator's lifetime. His complete plays have been published, in multiple languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. ''The New York Times'' theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the "three avatars of modernism". In 1962, Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, inspired by the god Pan (mythology), Pan. He was elected Transcendent Satrap of the 'Pataphysics#The Collège de 'Pataphysique, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (; 5 January 1921 – 14 December 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophical crime novels, and macabre satire. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten, a group of left-wing Swiss writers who convened regularly at a restaurant in the city of Olten. Life Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, canton of Bern, the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather, Ulrich Dürrenmatt, was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began studies in philosophy, German philology, and German literature at the University of Zürich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester where he also studied natural science. In 1943, he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career. In 1945–46, he wrote his first play ''It Is Wr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
