Epic Drama and Theater of the Absurd: A Reaction to Classical Theater
Reaction Against the Classical Theater: Theater of the Absurd and Epic
In the seventeenth century, the French developed the classical playwrights in the theater. The main structural features of the French classical theater are the separation of genres and styles, such as the tragedy that has great style and a solemn seriousness. The works consist of five acts, and the rules of the three unities should be respected. The unity of time refers to the need for the entire action to occur in a fictional 24-hour period. The unity of place means that the action should result in the same location. The unity of action means that the work has to be built under a theme, such as a drama or a romantic conflict between honor and duty. Moreover, as a reaction against classical theater arose new ways of doing theater: the theater of the absurd and the epic.
Epic Drama
Epic drama appeared in Germany in recent years of the decade 1920-30. Like epic poetry, drama adopts a narrative epic, contrary to what happens in a traditional theater. Bertolt Brecht was the theorist who, with the play by Georg Büchner, having collaborated in the political theater of Piscator, felt the need to promote a theatrical movement appropriate to the industrialized society of the twentieth century. Brecht suggests a theater that, while fun, is eligible to transform the world, arousing the viewer’s capacity for observation and critical attitude against the passivity of the spectator of bourgeois theater. Brecht’s theories clearly face, breaking down the three unities of place, time, and action.
This allows the recovery of theatrical elements and suggestions of other proprietary non-European cultures, sidelined by bourgeois theater. After Brecht, epic theater has expanded throughout the Western world, but the company has been the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Brecht himself, the most current signified within the new aesthetic.
Theater of the Absurd
The theater of the absurd is a theatrical genre cultivated by European and American writers between the 40s and 60s of the twentieth century. It was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who used it as a book title of his 1962. Esslin considers the work of these authors is a philosophical concept of artistic articulation of the absurdity of existence itself of Albert Camus. The peculiar characteristics of the theater of the absurd are the deliberate abandonment of a dramatic construction and the rejection of rational logical language consequential. The traditional structure (plot events, concatenation, resolution) is replaced by a succession of insignificant illogical situations related to a weak and transient tracer (a mood or an emotion).
The theater of the absurd is characterized by seemingly meaningless dialogue, dramatic and repetitive without logical connections that create a dreamy atmosphere. If in the past this type of carrier drama theater was only recently, the public has also discovered his tragicomic aspect.
Writers of the Theater of the Absurd
- Samuel Beckett
- Jean Genet
- Eugene Ionesco
- Tom Stoppard
- Arthur Adamov
- Harold Pinter
- Stanislav Stratiev
- Alfred Jarry
In Catalan, it is noteworthy Manuel Pedrolo.