Quick questions on Theatre of the Absurd: HSC Drama elective

Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) sets out the philosophical position the theatre would later dramatise. Camus argues that human life is "absurd" because consciousness seeks meaning in a universe that gives no rational answer. The proper response is not despair, not religious faith, and not philosophical certainty; it is to live with the absurdity. Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, is Camus's image of the absurd hero.

Plots that go nowhere or return to where they started. Two acts of Waiting for Godot are nearly identical; Endgame happens in a single static room.

Characters speak in non sequiturs, platitudes, broken academic jargon, or repetition. The classic example: the conversation between the Smith and Martin families in The Bald Soprano, built largely from English-language primer phrases.

Figures without psychological depth, consistent history, or social specificity. The convention of the realist character is refused.

Bare stage with a single tree; a single room with no exit; a bourgeois drawing room flattened into geometry. The set becomes metaphysical.

Many Absurdist plays are funny on the page. The despair lands precisely because the form is comic. Beckett's clowns (Vladimir and Estragon) come out of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as much as out of existentialism.

No conflict, no rising tension, no climax, no resolution. The audience's narrative expectations are deliberately denied.

Irish, lived in Paris. Wrote in French and English. Waiting for Godot (Theatre de Babylone, Paris, 5 January 1953, in French; English premiere 1955) is the founding play of the movement.

Romanian-French. The Bald Soprano (1950), The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), Rhinoceros (1959). Ionesco's plays are typically funnier and more openly satirical than Beckett's.

English. The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965). Pinter is sometimes treated as a separate "comedy of menace" school, but Esslin grouped him with the Absurdists.

French. The Maids (1947), The Balcony (1956), The Blacks (1959). Genet's plays are stylised, ritualised, and politically engaged with colonialism, race and sexuality.

American. The Zoo Story (1959), The American Dream (1961), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).

A single set. Hamm, blind and immobile in an armchair. Clov, his servant, who cannot sit down.

Two English couples at home. The Smiths and the Martins. Conversation built from English-language primer phrases.

A small French town. The population begins to turn into rhinoceroses one by one. Berenger, the protagonist, resists to the last.