num_pages: 480
description:  We're not beginning … to … to … mean something? Mean something? You and I mean something?(from 'Endgame' by Samuel Beckett) Martin Esslin coined the phrase 'Theatre of the Absurd' in this ground-breaking book, and the term has become part of the language just as this book has become an indispensable part of any literature and drama the definitive study of the playwrights who have dramatised the fundamental absurdity of the human condition. In this readable and illuminating work - still a classic of theatre studies - Esslin shows how Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter and others have confronted a world in which there is no communication and where man flounders in a void, cut off from his roots and shorn of all certainties."A seminal work" (Independent)"An exciting and stimulating book, a very useful reference work and a standard textbook" (Literary Review)
language: English
title: The Theatre Of The Absurd
titlecomplete: The Theatre Of The Absurd (Plays and Playwrights)
characters: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco
genres: Theory, Plays, Theatre, Reference, Philosophy, Drama, Nonfiction, Art, History, Literary Criticism
ratings_count: 950
publisher: Methuen Drama