ABSTRACT
The Theatre of the Absurd is one of the ways of facing up to a universe that has lost its meaning and purpose. Such a theatre is involved in the relatively few problems that remain: life, death, isolation, and communication, and it can, by its nature, only communicate ‘one poet’s most intimate and personal intuition of the human situation, his own sense of being, his individual vision of the world’. Like the Poetic Theatre, Absurd Theatre relies heavily on dream and fantasy but, unlike that theatre, it rejects consciously ‘poetic’ dialogue in favour of the banal. Esslin’s more important suggestions occur in a chapter called ‘The Significance of the Absurd’.
