ABSTRACT
The first, and least important, limitation is probably the explicit nature of the term ‘Absurd’, already hinted at in Pronko’s objection to it as to a label like ‘The School of Paris’. By 1955 Arthur Adamov was working on Paolo Paoli, in which he examines the ‘why’ of the First World War and begins to abandon Absurd techniques in favour of Brechtian epic theatre. Adamov educated in Switzerland and Germany, came to Paris in 1924 at the age of sixteen and began writing Surrealist poetry. During the 1930s he withdrew from literature and underwent some kind of spiritual crisis described in L’Aveu the first section of which he published in the significant year of 1938. Martin Esslin regrets the loss of ‘the fine frenzy, the haunting power of neurosis that gave the earlier plays their magnetic, poetical impact’, but it could be objected that Adamov, even in the early plays, has seldom if ever involved our emotions, only our intellect.
