ABSTRACT
Fernando Arrabal’s prominent inclusion in Martin Esslin’s artistic movement-defining The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) established a permanent link to absurdist literature for Arrabal’s early one-act plays. Arrabal later befriended Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and other playwrights of the absurd, but pointedly avoided such identification and instead created his own aesthetic, which he called Panic Theatre. However, it remains possible to discern elements of the absurd even in some of Arrabal’s later work. From that perspective, this chapter looks analytically at And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, Picnic on the Battlefield, The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, The Body-Builder’s Book of Love, and A Damsel for a Gorilla.
