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1592
SAHRDAYĀLOKA
Both, relationships and language of communication, were considered cliched and hollow. In Ionesco's "The Bald Prima Donna", a man and a woman who met as total strangers, found they were from the same city. In course of time, they discovered that they had been living in the same flat and, in fact, shared the same bed as husband and wife.
The absurdists exposed the cliched form and the inadequacy of language, especially for the portrayal of the abstract, psychological reality that is part of one's consciousness, and developed a new idiom suited to it for theatre, “Associative clusters of images with a strong visual appeal are an indespensable part of this diom,." There was neither a story nor a conflict in these plays. They did not depict the kind of reality Brecht of Oborne's plays did. The characters were not recognizable and their action seemed inapplicable.There was often a contradiction between the dialogue and the action. If you read or watched such a play with the interest, "What then ?" You would have been disappointed. - The appeal through poetic images in these plays was to reason, not emotions. A kind of tension caused by an unsettling realisation replaced the conventional conflict here. The suspense in them generally was not about what would happen next, it was about what was happening. More then the terse dialogue, it was the ingenious theatre language that became medium of communication. Chairs, a corpse, and rhinoceroses in Ionesco, characters in dust-bins in Beckett and role playing in Genet, for example, in their themes. They related to the very human existence rather than life in contemporary society.
There was a background to the shared vision of these playwrites. Around seven decades ago, Nietzsche had in an obituary announeed God dead. Two world wars had shaken faith in progress and rendered cherished personal and social ideals meaningless. Hopes of radical social change were belied. A sadist had numbed human sensitivity. Material affluence was no answer to the quest of lasting fulfilment. Words seemed to have been drained dry. Albert Camus wrote “The Myth of Sisyphus” in 1942. A broad-chested and strong Sisyphus kept rolling a huge stone up a steep rise to the mountain top. The endeavour endless, the outcome a failure.
Waiting for Godot-was recognized as a classic. Ionesco distinguished himself with his idiom, eminently suited to theatre, and his communication concerning the very essence of human life. Both these playwrights, and to some extent others, lent to their plays the strength and charm of poetry. Having a place in the main-stream
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