ABSTRACT
Arthur Adamov, arguably the first playwright to combine the subject matter and the form of the Theatre of the Absurd, and mentioned in the same breath as Beckett and Ionesco in the mid-1950s, remains largely overlooked by the English-speaking world. Only about half of his plays have been translated, and even fewer are available for English-language production, partially because of the staging difficulties they present. Adamov was influenced by surrealism, expressionism, and Theatre of Cruelty, and by individuals like Franz Kafka and August Strindberg. His first major work, The Confession, is an aptly named self-analysis centered on existential alienation, the failures of language (and indeed of communication in general) and his own sexually based discomfort, later echoed in several of his female characters. This chapter looks at Adamov’s nine earliest plays—those written before he veered into something closer to epic theater—in terms of their dramatic and theatrical innovations and the relationship between page and stage. Adamov’s plays straddle the line between the serious and the comic: his comedies are underlaid with terror; his tragedies often exhibit a mordant irony. Above all, he creates worlds of isolation and depression: very much at the center of the absurd universe.
