Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

232 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
apparently gay, as is Inez, one of the two women, while
Estelle, the final occupant, seems to be heterosexual—
yet none of the characters are entirely clear about their
or each other’s desires. Uncertainty reigns: Estelle pursues
Garcin, Garcin pursues Inez, and Inez pursues
Estelle in a triangle of misdirected affections and failed
connections that, one presumes, will continue maddeningly
through eternity. The infinite bleakness of this
play’s fantastical situation and the numbing futility of
each character’s aspirations provoke Garcin to beg for
torture, the traditional instrument of punishment in the
underworld—but nothing quite so simple is forthcoming.
Instead, he is forced to conclude: “Hell is other people.”
And the play ends with a line that is characteristic of the
modern stylized theatre:
GARCIN: Well, well, let’s get on with it.
Garcin’s resignation suggests that although the play
concludes, the situation continues, eternally, behind the
drawn curtain.
No Exit is a classic dramatic statement of existentialism,
of which Sartre was the twentieth century’s leading
exponent. Remove the fantastical elements—that this is
Hell and the characters are ghosts—and we have Sartre’s
vision of human interaction: in the absence of any divine
justice, every individual forever seeks affirmation and
self-realization in the eyes of everyone else, but fails to
receive it. Each character in the play carries with him or
her some baggage of guilt and expectation, each seeks
from another some certification of final personal worth,
and each is endlessly thwarted in their quests. We are
all doomed to revolve around each other in frustratingly
incomplete accord, suggests Sartre, or as he famously put
it, we are all “condemned to be free.”
One can accept or reject Sartre’s view, but no one
can dispute the brilliance of his dramatic components:
the fantastical Hell, an amusing “valet” who brings each
character onto the stage, and the highly contrived assemblage
of mismatched characters all serve to enliven his
intellectual argument. Sartre’s characters are philosophically
representative rather than psychologically whole;
there is no intention on Sartre’s part to portray individual
people with interesting idiosyncrasies, and there is no
feeling on our part that the characters have a personal
life beyond what we see in the play. Biographical character
analysis would be useless for an actor assigned
to play one of these roles, and the author deliberately
ignores the question of psychological motivation, even
in this sexually charged atmosphere. What Sartre presents
instead is a bleak, though compelling, philosophy of
interpersonal relations.
Theatre of the Absurd: Waiting for Godot The
term theatre of the absurd, coined by English critic Martin
Esslin in his 1962 book of that name, applies to a
grouping of plays that share certain common structures
and styles and are tied together by the theory of “absurdism”
as formulated by French essayist and playwright
Albert Camus (1913–1960). Camus likened the human
condition to that of the mythological King Sisyphus, who
because of his cruelty on Earth was condemned eternally
in the afterlife to roll a stone up a hill—only to have it
roll back down upon reaching the top. Camus saw the
modern individual as similarly engaged in an eternally
futile task: the absurdity of searching for some meaning
or purpose or order in human life. To Camus, the inescapable
irrationality of the universe is what makes this
task absurd. On the one hand, human beings yearn for
a “lost” unity and lasting truth; on the other hand, the
world can only be seen as irrecoverably fragmented—
chaotic, unsummable, permanently unorganized, and
unorganizable. The fundamental question of humanity
is not the traditional “what is the meaning of life?” but
instead, in facing the fact of life’s meaninglessness, the
far bleaker “why shouldn’t I commit suicide?”
The plays that constitute the theatre of the absurd are
obsessed with the futility of all action and the pointlessness
of all direction. These themes are developed theatrically
through a deliberate and self-conscious flaunting
of a sense of the ridiculous. Going beyond the use of
symbols and the fantasy and poetry of other nonrealists,
the absurdists distinguish themselves by fully embodying
the meaninglessness of life without explaining it. Sartre’s
characters were also hopeless, but they were at least
able to talk about their hopelessness. In the theater of
the absurd, characters are helplessly trapped without any
clear awareness—and so, too, is the audience.
The theatre of the absurd can be said to include midtwentieth-century
works by Jean Genet (French), Eugène
Ionesco (Romanian), Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Swiss), Arthur
Adamov (Russian), Slawomir Mrozek (Polish), Harold
Pinter (English), Edward Albee ( American), Fernando
Arrabal (Spanish), and the Irish poet, playwright, and
novelist Samuel Beckett. And although Paris is the center
of this theatre—so much so that the works of Ionesco,
Adamov, Arrabal, and Beckett are all written in French
rather than in their native tongues—its influence is felt
worldwide.
Beckett (1906–1989), the unquestioned leader of the
absurdist writers, eschewed all realism, romanticism, and
rationalism to create relentlessly unenlightening works
that are indeed committed to a final obscurity. “Art has
nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear,