Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd (absurdist drama) is a movement in European dramaturgy of the 1950s and 1960s that depicted the meaninglessness and irrationality of human existence in a hostile, incomprehensible world through the destruction of the traditional dramatic form: the disintegration of plot, logic, character, and language, repetitiveness, the illogicality of dialogue, and grotesque. The absurdists showed the impossibility of genuine communication and the solitude of the human being. The term was introduced by the critic Martin Esslin. Classic examples are Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and Rhinoceros. In Ukrainian literature elements of absurdist poetics — illogicality, grotesque, the deformation of language to convey the tragedy of being — are present in experimental dramaturgy and are reinterpreted in modern Ukrainian plays and prose that assimilated the European experience and applied it to reflection on the totalitarian and post-totalitarian experience.