ABSTRACT
Samuel Beckett wrote five dramas for television from the 1960s to the 1980s, and many of his theatre works were adapted for the screen. These dramas were presented to their TV audiences in relation to contemporary European avant-garde theatre (of which the Absurd was a part) and their visual sparseness and lack of story or characterisation were seen as appropriate to the existential hopelessness of their times. Martin Esslin categorised Beckett as an Absurdist writer, and his framing of Beckett’s work was important because of the widespread circulation of Esslin’s writing and because Esslin had a powerful role in BBC’s Drama department, commissioning work for TV and radio. Other broadcasting executives and critics in Britain and in Germany saw similar significance and relevance in Beckett’s dramas and valued their experimentation with the possible relationships between image and sound in television drama. The Absurd is not only useful as a way of highlighting Beckett’s TV plays’ aesthetic achievements but was also important historically in providing a vocabulary for people to categorise dramas that they found obscure and challenging.
