The concept of “Theater of the absurd. The historical background of the origin of the drama of the absurd
Features of the "theater of the absurd"
The theater of the absurd (absurdity, nonsense) is one of the modernist directions of theatrical art of the 20th century, which arose in France in the 1950-60s. In absurd plays, the world is presented as a meaningless, logicless pile of facts, deeds, words and destinies. The principles of absurdism were most fully embodied in the dramas The Bald Singer (50) by the playwright Ionesco and Waiting for Godot (53) by Beckett.
In practice, theater of the absurd denies realistic characters, situations and all other relevant theatrical techniques. Time and place are uncertain and changeable, even the simplest causal relationships are destroyed. Pointless intrigues, repetitive dialogues and aimless chatter, dramatic inconsistency of actions - everything is subordinated to one goal: to create a fabulous, and maybe even terrible, mood.
The basis of the drama was the destruction of the dramatic material. There is no local and historical concreteness in the plays. A significant part of the plays of the theater of the absurd take place in small rooms, rooms, apartments, completely isolated from the outside world. The temporal sequence of events is destroyed. A person in an absurd world is the personification of passivity and helplessness. He cannot realize anything except his own helplessness. He is deprived of freedom of choice.
The main theme of all anti-plays is the absurdity of the world, which manifests itself in the violation of logical connections between objects and phenomena, in the meaninglessness of reality. This is demonstrated with:
- 1) Irony, farce, parody, grotesque.
- 2) Destruction of linguistic forms, intentional illogical phrases, language automatism. The motive of "getting stuck in words" appears, like in a quagmire.
- 3) Habitual logical cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena and objects are broken and replaced by their random or associative cohesion. The logic of dreams is also used, which does not obey the control of consciousness.
- 4) Metaphorical transmission of a feeling of shock, fear, transmission of surprise in front of life. These feelings will certainly appear as soon as a person realizes that all his life values \u200b\u200bare meaningless and there is an illusion. It is designed to draw the attention of an ordinary person to the tragedy of life, because in his daily life a person is not inclined to think about the issues of life and death and gets bogged down in vulgarity.
- 5) Using the "borderline situation".
- 6) The main motive: "death as decay, decay, silence."
- 7) The literal realization of metaphors and neologisms - this is what fiction in antidrama is based on.
- 8) The connection between the tragic and the comic.
- 9) Using "minus tricks". "Minus-trick" is a significant rejection of the pictorial principles of a traditional character (intrigue, action, characters, etc.). For example, anti-drama heroes are anti-heroes. In Ionesco's early plays, the characters have no individual traits, they are “puppet” heroes. The actions of the characters are determined not by their characters, but by the situation in which they find themselves. Also, the play is destroyed at the genre level, then episodes, remarks and phrases.
- 10) The place of action and the time in the theater of the absurd are often abstract, this emphasizes their universality ("always and everywhere").
- 50g. in Paris, Ionesco's play "The Bald Singer" was staged, at the same time the first "anti-plays" by Arthur Adamov appeared. Eugene Ionesco (1912-94) called his theater “anti-thematic, anti-ideological, anti-realist,” and contrasted it with all versions of the “engaged” theater. In The Bald Singer, the clock lost its ability to measure time, because time as an objective category lost its meaning along with the outside world, which lost its reality. Words seem to break off the chain, since they are not held back by any objectively existing reality. In Chairs (51), "reality", that is, the characters appearing on the stage, according to the author's instructions, should seem extremely unreal, while the characters remaining invisible create the impression of absolutely authentic, the impression of a crowd filling the scene through which it is impossible get through.
In "Rhinos (59)" tells about the strange transformation of the inhabitants of a certain settlement into rhinos, which seems to everyone to be a normal and natural thing, even desirable due to the devaluation of everything human. This tragicomedy can be read as a satirical exposure of fascism and totalitarianism. Also the tragicomedy "The King Dies" (62) - about humanity, subject to death, stricken with incurable infirmity, about reality itself, which disappears with the king at the time of his death, dissolving into nothingness. The triumph of death, the extermination of everyone and everything is also demonstrated in the story of the city's destruction (Games of Massacre 70).
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) In his novels ("Murphy", "Molloy") the fundamental idea was formed: "there is nothing more real than nothing", which is realized in Beckett's "anti-dramas". Beckett's works are distinguished by minimalism, the use of innovative techniques, and philosophical themes. In most of his works, he put his characters in the extreme framework of existence, in order to focus on the essential aspects of human existence. Despite the fact that Beckett boldly penetrates into the depths of the primordial mystery and horror of human existence, he is predominantly a comic writer. Laughter should arise at the sight of that stupid self-righteousness and consciousness of its own significance, with which a person surrenders to illusory and trifling attractions. Ultimately, Beckett's dramas do not leave a gloomy and depressing impression, but they bring liberating catharsis, which is the goal of every theater from its very inception.
In the play Waiting for Godot, which made Beckett famous (53), the action is reduced to waiting for a certain Godot, and the characterization of the “inactive persons,” Vladimir and Estragon, is completely exhausted by this state, since they do not remember anything, know nothing, and know nothing. In a small "Comedy" (66), the characters - two numbered women and a man - almost lose their ability to speak, without acquiring, however, the qualities of the faces of "actors": they lean out of the jugs and say something when a ray of light falls on them, and in the dark they plunge into nothingness.
32. Features of the theater of the absurd: origins, representatives, features of the dramatic structure.
Works in the list related to the theater of the absurd:
Beckett: "Waiting for Godot"
Ionesco: "Rhinos"
Given the senselessness of the storytelling of these plays, they are really easier to read. Below will be a retelling of the plot, but it may not help.
Other representatives:
Kafka: in every introductory article about Kafka, the word "absurd" appears at least once, but Moskvina, for example, separates Kafka's work and absurdity because of the emphasized logic of events taking place in Kafka's worlds. Camus also shares Kafka and absurdity due to the fact that his work still contains some glimmers of hope, which is unacceptable for the absurdity in Camus's understanding.
Stoppard: "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is a prime example of an absurd tragicomedy.
Vvedensky and Kharms: domestic representatives. I do not think that they should be cited as an example just like that, given that we have a course in foreign literature, but if asked, mention them so as not to lose face.
Temporary structure:
1843 - "Fear and Awe" by Kierkegaard is written
1914-1918 - World War I
1916 - the emergence of Dada
1917 - in the manifesto "New Spirit" Guillaume Apollinaire introduces the term "surrealism"
1939-1945 - World War II
1942 - publication of the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Camus
1951 - production of "The Bald Singer" Ionesco
1952 - production of Ionesco's "Chairs"
1953 - production of Ionesco's "Victims of Debt"
1953 - production of "Waiting for Godot" by Beckett
1960 - production of Ionesco's "Rhinos"
1962 - publication of the book "Theater of the Absurd" by theater critic Martin Esslin
The term "absurd":
Camus: "A world that lends itself to explanation, even the most bad, - this world is familiar to us. But if the universe is suddenly deprived of both illusion and knowledge, a person becomes an outsider in it. A person is exiled forever, for he is deprived of the memory of the lost fatherland, and hopes for the promised land. Strictly speaking, the feeling of absurdity is this discord between a person and his life, the actor and the scenery. "
"A person is faced with the irrationality of the world. He feels that he desires happiness and rationality. Absurdity is born in this clash between the calling of man and the unreasonable silence of the world."
"If I accuse an innocent person of a nightmarish crime, if I tell a respectable person that he longs for his own sister, then they will answer me that this is absurd. [...] A respectable person points to the antinomy between the act that I ascribe to him and the principles all his life. “This is absurd” means “it is impossible”, and besides, “it is contradictory.” If a man armed with a knife attacks a group of submachine gunners, I think his action is absurd. But it is so only because of the disproportion between intention and reality , due to the contradiction between real forces and the goal. [...] Therefore, I have every reason to say that the feeling of absurdity is born not from a simple study of a fact or impression, but bursts in along with a comparison of the actual state of affairs with some kind of reality , by comparing action with the world lying outside of this action. In essence, absurdity is a split. It is not in any of the compared elements. It is born in their collision. "
Ionesco: "I still do not really know what the word" absurd "means, except when it asks about absurdity; and I repeat that those who are not surprised that exist, who do not ask themselves questions about being, who believe that everything is normal, naturally, while the world touches the supernatural, these people are flawed. [...] But the ability to wonder will return, the question of the absurdity of this world cannot but arise, even if there is no answer to it. [... ] Let's try to ascend at least mentally to that which is not subject to decay, to the real, that is, to the sacred, and to the ritual, this sacred expressing - and which can be acquired without artistic creativity. "
"The absurd is something devoid of purpose ... A person cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots has died; all his actions are meaningless, absurd, useless."
Esslin: "A good play has a skillfully constructed plot, in plays of the absurd there is no plot and plot; a good play is valued for its characters and motivations, in plays of absurdity, characters cannot be recognized, characters are perceived almost like puppets; in a good play, intrigue is justified, which As a result, it is resolved, in plays of the absurd there is often no beginning or end; a good play is a mirror of nature and presents its era in subtle sketches, plays of the absurd reflect dreams and nightmares; good plays are distinguished by accurate dialogues and witty remarks, plays of the absurd often represent incoherent babble. "
Specifically defining the term "absurd", Esslin quotes Camus ("the discord between the actor and the set") and Ionesco ("something devoid of purpose").
Moskvina: judging by the lecture on Proust and Kafka, she perceives the absurd primarily as something illogical and irrational.
General Provisions
The theater of the absurd is a type of modern drama based on the concept of a person's total alienation from the physical and social environment. This kind of plays first appeared in the early 1950s in France, and then spread to Western Europe and the United States.
The idea of \u200b\u200bthe absurdity of the human lot in a hostile or indifferent world was first developed by A. Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus), who was strongly influenced by S. Kierkegaard, F. Kafka and F. M. Dostoevsky. The roots of the theater of the absurd can be found in the theoretical and practical activities of representatives of such aesthetic movements of the early 20th century as Dadaism and Surrealism, and in clownery, the music hall, and the comedies of Chaplin.
They started talking about the emergence of a new drama after the Paris premieres of "The Bald Soprano" (The Bald Soprano, 1950) Ionesco and "Waiting for Godot" (Waiting for Godot, 1953) by Beckett. It is characteristic that the singer herself does not appear in The Bald Singer, but there are two married couples on the stage, whose inconsistent, clichéd speech reflects the absurdity of a world in which language rather than facilitates communication. In Beckett's play, two vagabonds wait on the road for a certain Godot, who never appears. In a tragicomic atmosphere of loss and alienation, these two antiheroes recall incoherent fragments from a past life, experiencing an unconscious sense of danger.
The art of the absurd is a modernist movement that seeks to create an absurd world, as a reflection of the real world, for this naturalistic copies of real life were lined up chaotically without any connection.
The basis of the drama was the destruction of the dramatic material. There is no local and historical concreteness in the plays. A significant part of the plays of the theater of the absurd take place in small rooms, rooms, apartments, completely isolated from the outside world. The temporal sequence of events is destroyed. So, in Ionesco's play "The Bald Singer" (1949), 4 years after death, the corpse turns out to be warm, and it is buried six months after death. Two acts of the play "Waiting for Godot" (1952) are separated by night, and "maybe 50 years." The characters in the play themselves do not know this.
The lack of historical concreteness and temporary chaos are complemented by the violation of logic in the dialogues. The dialogue is reduced, outside the partner. The heroes do not hear each other.
The very title of the plays "The Bald Singer" is absurd: in this "antidrama" the bald singer not only does not appear, but is not even mentioned.
They shared with existentialism the idea of \u200b\u200bthe world as chaos, any collision of a person with the world generates conflict, distrust of communication.
They bring the principle to artistic expression - show the absurd by the means of the absurd.
The absurdists borrowed nonsense and a combination of incompatible from the surrealists and transferred these techniques to the stage. With scrupulous accuracy S. Dali wrote out Venus de Milo on one of his paintings. With less care he depicted the boxes located on her torso. Each of the details is similar and easy to understand. The combination of Venus's torso with drawers deprives the picture of any logic.
Parts of the sentences are in a ridiculous combination.
The theater of the absurd wanted to show the real world.
A person in the theater of the absurd is incapable of action. The heroes of the works of art of the absurd cannot complete any action, they are unable to carry out any plan.
The personalities in the plays are leveled, devoid of individuality, similar to mechanisms. Often the heroes of plays have the same names, according to the figures of the theater of the absurd, people are indistinguishable from each other.
The heroes are ridiculous characters, they do not know anything about the world and about themselves, declassed elements, or philistines, there are no heroes who have ideals and see the meaning of life. People are doomed to exist in an incomprehensible and unchanging world of chaos and absurdity.
In an effort to emphasize the atmosphere of ugliness and pathology that surrounds a person, Beckett paints in his plays anti-aestheticism, the insanity of life. In order to arouse the disgust of readers and viewers for the heroes of the play "Waiting for Proudly", Beckett insistently repeats that one of them "stinks from the mouth", while the other "stinks".
Numerous plays of the theater of the absurd of the first decade (1949-1958) are determined not by the plot of the works, but by the general atmosphere of ideatism and chaos, recreated on the stage.
The term "Theater of the Absurd" is introduced by Esslin in the essay of the same name: it was he who saw the similarity between the absurdist philosophy of Camus expressed in "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Rebellious Man" and the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov and Zhenet.
Ionesco on the theater of the absurd
“It seems to me that half of the theatrical works created before us are absurd to the extent that they are, for example, comical; after all, comic is absurd. And it seems to me that the ancestor of this theater, its great ancestor, could be Shakespeare, who makes his hero to say: “The world is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and rage, devoid of any sense and meaning.” Probably, we can say that the theater of the absurd dates back to even more distant times and that Oedipus was also an absurd character, since what happened to him was absurd, but with one difference: Oedipus unconsciously violated the laws and was punished for breaking them. But laws and norms existed. Even if they were violated. In our theater, the characters seem to be neither for which they do not cling, and if I am allowed to quote myself, then the old people in my play "Chairs" are in a world without laws and norms, without rules and transcendental concepts. I wanted to show the same thing in a more cheerful spirit in a play like " Bald ne vitsa ", for example.
It seems to me that the word "absurd" is too strong: it is impossible to call anything absurd if there is no clear idea of \u200b\u200bwhat is not absurd, if you do not know the meaning of what is not absurd. But I can argue that the characters of "Chairs" were looking for a meaning that they did not find, they were looking for a law, they were looking for a higher form of behavior, they were looking for something that cannot be called otherwise than divinity.
The theater of the absurd was also a theater of struggle — that is what it was for me — against the bourgeois theater, which it sometimes parodied, and against the realistic theater. I argued and assert that reality is not realistic, and I criticized and fought against realistic, socialist realist, Brechtian theater. I have already said that realism is not reality, that realism is a theatrical school that considers reality in a certain way, just like romanticism or surrealism. In the bourgeois theater, I did not like that he was busy with trifles: business, economics, politics, adultery, entertainment in the Pascal sense of the word. It can probably be said that the theater of adultery in the 19th and early 20th centuries originates from Racine, with the only huge difference that Racine died of adultery, he killed. And for post-Krasinov authors, this is nothing more than a trifle. Another drawback of realistic theater is that it is ideological, that is, to some extent a deceitful, dishonest theater. Not only because it is unknown what reality is, not only because not a single person of science is able to say what "real" means, but also because a realistic author sets himself the task of proving something, recruiting people, viewers , readers on behalf of the ideology in which the author wants to convince us, but which does not become more true from this. Any realistic theater is a fraudulent theater, even and especially if the author is sincere. Genuine sincerity comes from the most distant, from the depths of the irrational, the unconscious. Talking about yourself is much more convincing and truthful than talking about others than getting people involved in always controversial political associations. Speaking about myself, I am talking about everyone. A real poet does not lie, does not dissemble, does not want to recruit anyone, because a true poet does not deceive, but invents, and this is completely different.
Characters without metaphysical roots, perhaps in search of a forgotten center, a fulcrum outside of them. Beckett wrote about the same, colder, perhaps more clairvoyant. We wanted to bring to the stage and show the audience the very existential existence of man in his fullness, integrity, in his deep tragedy, his destiny, that is, the realization of the absurdity of the world. The very story "told by an idiot"
Esslin on theater of the absurd
“It is worth emphasizing that playwrights, whose plays are viewed under the general title of“ theater of the absurd, ”do not represent any self-proclaimed or self-sufficient school. On the contrary, each of these writers is a person who considers himself lonely, outsider, circumcised and isolated from the world, existing in his own sphere. Each of them has their own idea of \u200b\u200bthe form and content; their roots, origins, experience. If they are also understandable and in spite of everything they have in common with others, this is explained by the fact that their work is a true mirror reflecting anxiety, feelings and thoughts of an important aspect of life in the modern West.
A distinctive feature of this trend is that rejected by the past centuries, considered unnecessary and discredited, our century dismissed as cheap and childish illusions. The decline of religion was masked until the end of World War II by a surrogate for belief in progress, nationalism and other totalitarian delusions. All this was shattered by the war. In 1942, Albert Camus coolly posed the question of why, if life has lost its meaning, a person no longer sees a way out in suicide.
The feeling of metaphysical suffering and the absurdity of the human lot in general is the theme of the plays by Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Zhenet [...]. But this is not the only theme of the theater of the absurd. Such a perception of the meaninglessness of life, rejection of the devaluation of ideals, purity, and purposefulness is the theme of the plays by Girodoux, Anouille, Salacrou, Sartre and, of course, Camus. But these playwrights significantly differ from the playwrights of the absurd in their sense of the irrationalism of the human lot in a very clear and logically reasoned form. The theater of the absurd seeks to express the meaninglessness of life and the impossibility of a rational approach to this by open rejection of rational schemes of discursive ideas. While Sartre or Camus put new content into old forms, the theater of the absurd takes a step forward in an effort to achieve the unity of basic ideas and forms of expression. In a sense, in the theater of Sartre and Camus, artistic expression is not adequate to their philosophy, differing from the way the theater of the absurd resorts.
The theater of the absurd strives for a radical devaluation of the language: poetry should be born from concrete material images of the scene itself. In this concept, the element of language plays an important, but subordinate role, but what happens on stage and outside it often contradicts the words spoken by the characters. [...]
The theater of the absurd is part of the "anti-literary" movement of our time, expressed in abstract painting, which rejected the "literary" elements in paintings; in the "new French novel", based on the subject image and rejected empathy and anthropomorphism. "
Esslyn on Waiting for Godot by Beckett
"Beckett's plays require a careful approach to avoid the pitfalls that oversimplify their meaning. This does not mean that we cannot undertake a thorough investigation, isolating the series of images and themes, trying to understand their structural basis. Results will be easier to achieve by following the author's idea, knowing that you can get, if not answers to his questions, then at least understand the questions he asks.
Waiting for Godot has no plot; the static situation is investigated. "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody leaves, it's scary."
On a country road, near a tree, two old tramps Vladimir and Estragon are waiting. At the beginning of the first act - an open situation. At the end of the first act, they are informed that Monsieur Godot, whom they think they should meet, cannot come, but tomorrow he will definitely come. The second act repeats this situation. The same boy comes and reports the same.
The play contains an element of crude, grassroots humor, characteristic of the music hall or circus tradition: Tarragon loses his trousers; an episode-long gag with three hats, which the vagabonds wear, take off, then pass on to each other, creating endless confusion, and the abundance of this confusion causes laughter. Nicklaus Gessner, the author of a talented dissertation on Beckett, lists about forty-five remarks indicating that one of the characters is losing the vertical position that symbolizes human dignity.
Quite a few witty attempts have been made to establish the etymology of the name Godot, to find out whether Beckett's intention was conscious or unconscious to make 52 him the object of the searches of Vladimir and Estragon. It can be assumed that Godot is a weakened form of God, a diminutive by analogy Pierre - Pierrot, Charles - Charlot, plus an association with the image of Charlie Chaplin, his little man, who is called Charlot in France; his bowler hat is worn by all four characters in the play.
Whether Godot means the intervention of supernatural forces, or does he symbolize the mythical basis of being, and his arrival is awaited for the situation to change, or he connects both, - in any case, his role is secondary. The theme of the play is not Godot, but the act of waiting as a characteristic aspect of the human lot. Throughout our life we \u200b\u200bare waiting for something, and Godot is the object of our expectation, be it an event or a thing, or a person, or death. Moreover, in the act of waiting, one feels the passage of time in its purest, most visual form. If we are active, then we strive to forget about the passage of time, not paying attention to it, but if we are passive, then we are faced with the action of time. As Beckett writes in his study about Proust: “This is not an escape from hours and days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday, for yesterday we were deformed or deformed by us. ... Yesterday was not a milestone that we passed, but a sign on the beaten path of years, our desperate fate, heavy and dangerous, it sits inside us ... We not only get tired of everyone yesterday, we become different and by no means more desperate than we were. " The run of time confronts us with the main problem of being: the nature of our "I", a subject constantly changing in time, being in perpetual motion, and therefore always beyond our control. "A person can perceive reality only as a retrospective hypothesis. A slow, dull, monochrome process of pouring into a vessel containing a fluid of the past tense, multicolored, driven by the phenomenon of this time, constantly takes place."
Expectation is experiential recognition of the action of time, constantly changing. Moreover, since nothing really happens, the passage of time is just an illusion. The incessant energy of time speaks against itself, it is aimless and therefore ineffective and meaningless. The more things change, the more they remain the same. And this is the terrifying immutability of the world. "The tears of the world are a constant value. If someone starts crying, it means that somewhere someone has stopped crying." One day is like another, and we die as if we were never born. Pozzo talks about this in the last monologue-explosion: "How much can you scoff when asking questions about the damned time? .. It's not enough for you that ... every day is like another, one day he was numb, and another day I went blind, and such a beautiful day will come when we all go deaf, and on some beautiful day we were born, and a day will come and we will die, and there will be another day, exactly the same, and after it another, the same ... They give birth right on the graves : only the day will dawn, and now it's night again. "
Soon Vladimir agrees with this: "They give birth in agony right on the graves. And below, in the pit, the gravedigger is already preparing his shovel."
When asked what the theme of Waiting for Godot was, Beckett sometimes quoted St. Augustine: "Augustine has a wonderful saying. I would like to quote him in Latin. It sounds better in Latin than in English:" Don't lose hope. One of the robbers were saved. Do not take into account that the other was condemned to eternal torment. " Sometimes Beckett added: "I am interested in some ideas, even if I do not believe in them ... There is a tremendous image in this saying. It affects."
A characteristic feature of the play is the assumption that the best way out of the tramps' situation - and they say this - is to prefer suicide to waiting for Godot. "We thought about it when the world was young, in the nineties. ... Join hands and jump from the Eiffel Tower among the first. Then we were still quite respectable. 60 But now it's too late, we won't even be allowed there." Committing suicide is their favorite decision, impracticable due to their incompetence and lack of suicide weapons. The fact that suicide fails every time, Vladimir and Estragon explain by expectation, or simulate this expectation. "I wish I knew what he would suggest. Then we would know whether to do it or not." The hope of salvation may simply be a way of avoiding the suffering and pain generated by contemplating the human lot. This is a striking parallel between the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and the creative intuition of Beckett, who never consciously expressed existentialist views. If for Beckett, as for Sartre, a person's moral obligation is to face life, realizing that the essence of being is nothing, and freedom and the need to constantly create oneself make one choice after another, then Godot, in terminology Sartre, may well personify "bad faith": "The first act of bad faith is to avoid something that cannot be avoided, in the avoidance of avoidance."
Despite the possible parallels, we should not go too far in trying to attribute Beckett to any school of thought. The singularity and magnificence of "Waiting for Godot" is that the play involves many interpretations from the standpoint of philosophical, religious, psychological. In addition, this is a poem about time, fragility and mystery of life, the paradox of variability and stability, necessity and absurdity "
Esslin on "Rhino" Ionesco
“The world recognition of Ionesco as the central figure of the theater of the absurd began with“ Rhino ”.
The hero of "Rhino" is Beranger.
Beranger at Rhino works in the production department of a legal publishing house, just as Ionesco worked at one time. He is in love with his colleague Mademoiselle Desi. Her name is reminiscent of Beranger's first love - Dani. He has a friend Jean. On Sunday morning, they saw, or believe they saw, one, or perhaps two, rhinoceroses racing down the town's main street. Gradually, rhinos are getting bigger and bigger. The inhabitants have contracted a mysterious disease, rhinoceros, which not only turns them into rhinos, but gives rise to the desire to turn into these strong, aggressive and thick-skinned animals. In the final in the whole city, only Beranger and Desi remain human. But Desi also cannot resist the temptation to become like everyone else. Beranger is left alone; the last person, he courageously declares that he does not surrender.
The Rhino is known to reflect the feelings of Ionesco before leaving Romania in 1938, when more and more of his acquaintances joined the fascist Iron Guard movement. He said: “As always, I indulged in my thoughts. All my life I remembered how I was stunned by the possibility of manipulating opinion, its instant evolution, the power of its infection, turning into an epidemic. People allow themselves to suddenly accept a new religion, doctrine, surrender to fanaticism. ... At such moments we become witnesses of a real mental mutation.I don't know if you have noticed, if people do not share your views, and you stop understanding them, and they stop understanding you, the impression of confronting monsters, such as rhinos, is created. They will kill you with a clear conscience. Over the past quarter century, history has shown that people not only became like rhinos, but turned into them. "
At the premiere in Dusseldorf at the theater Schauspielhausthe German audience immediately recognized the arguments of the characters, who believed that they should follow a general trend: the audience heard or used similar arguments at a time when the German people could not resist the temptations of Hitler. Some of the characters in the play wished to become thick-skinned: they admired the brutal strength and simplicity that arose when suppressing too weak human feelings. Others did this because it would be possible to turn rhinos back into humans if you learn to understand their way of thinking. She's also a group, especially Desi, just couldn't afford to be different from the majority. Noorrhoid is not only a disease called totalitarianism, characteristic of the right and left, but also the desire for conformity. "Rhino" is a witty play. It is full of brilliant effects; it differs from most of Ionesco's plays in that it gives the impression of being understandable. London Timespublished a review entitled "Ionesco's play is clear to everyone."
But is it really that easy to understand? Bernard Françoelle in CahiersduCollé gedePataphysique remarked in a witty article that Beranger's final confession and his earlier reflections on the superiority of humans over rhinos are strangely reminiscent of the cries of "Long live the white race!" in the plays "The Future in Eggs" and "Victims of Debt". If we examine the logical train of thought of Beranger in a conversation with his friend Dudard, we will see that he defends his desire to remain a person with the same outbursts instinctivefeelings, which he condemns in rhinos, and when he notices his mistake, he only corrects himself, replacing "instinct" with intuition. Moreover, in the very finale, Beranger bitterly regrets that it seems to him that he cannot turn into a rhino! His latest audacious declaration of faith in humanism is just a fox's disdain for grapes that are too green. The farcical and tragicomic challenge to Beranger is far from true heroism, and the final meaning of the play is not as clear as some critics thought. The play shows the absurdity of a challenge to the same extent as the absurdity of conformism, the tragedy of an individualist who cannot merge with a happy mass of less sensitive people like him, the feeling of an artist who feels like a pariah. These are the themes of Kafka and Thomas Mann. To a certain extent, Beranger's final situation reminds of the victim of another metamorphosis - Gregor Samsa in Kafka's "Metamorphosis". Samsa turns into a huge insect, the rest do not change; Beranger's last man finds himself in the same situation as Samsa, because now it is normal to turn into a rhino, to remain a man is monstrous. In the final monologue, Beranger regrets that he has white soft skin and dreams of rough, dark green, shell-like skin. "I am only one monster, only me!" he shouts, until he finally decides to remain human.
"Rhino" is a pamphlet against conformism and insensitivity (the latter is definitely present in the play), a mockery of an individualist who only sacrifices necessity, emphasizing the superiority of his finely organized artistic nature. Where the play goes beyond propaganda simplicity, it turns into evidence of the fatal confusion and absurdity of human life. And only a performance that reveals the ambiguity of Beranger's position in the finale can give a complete picture of the play. "
| " |
It's hard to argue with the claim that this "crazy, crazy, crazy" world has gone a little crazy. And if anyone else doubts it, you should watch at least one of the great films that are collected in this "ten". However, it is not surprising if someone wants to see or revise all the films. You will definitely not regret it!
1. The film "Love and Death"
director Woody Allen
Without a doubt, a cult comedy from the master of this genre Woody Allen. Just a fountain of sparkling and at the same time intellectual humor on a very interesting topic. And the topic is the following. A certain Russian landowner from a district town in every possible way tries to evade the call to fight Napoleon. Because all he has in his arsenal is a long and sharp tongue. Unparalleled self-irony, philosophy for dummies, politics and once again politics - made this film forever beloved, especially in our country. Whether the hero managed to avoid the army or not, see for yourself.
2. The film "Log"
director Jan Schwankmeier
This level of surrealism is perhaps only found in Lynch. Jan Schwankmeier translated the Czech scary tale into screen language and it looks funny. Out of hopelessness, a young childless couple had an idea to have a stump of a tree instead of a child ... Which grows quickly and eats a lot, and it eats everything. Even a man for a sweet soul. And if the newly-made parents take care of their logs in every possible way, their wonderful neighbors, on the contrary, do not pay attention to their "live" daughter. As they say, the contrast is obvious.
3. The film "Dress"
directed by Alex Van Warmerdam
How sometimes the imagination of the creators admires, to what extent their visualization reaches! An ordinary dress, even in bright colors, but what a stir around it! People just go crazy, tear it apart and still it pushes everyone to madness. It excites some, leads to the death of others, and at first glance is just a rag. What will happen to him next?
4. The film "City of Zero"
director Karen Shakhnazarov
The plot of the film seems to be copied from some novel by the Strugatsky brothers, where the hero finds himself in an unknown city, in which everything is turned upside down, different concepts and completely different morality. As in a biblical parable, he is presented with his head on a platter, only the head is not someone else's, but himself ... And there is only one way out, you need to get used to it urgently, so as not to go crazy. However, there is also wisdom in the film. Which in the end will be pulled apart by all and sundry.
5. Film "Investigation in the case of a citizen beyond all suspicion"
director Elio Petri
A film that won an Oscar. Comedy! Not a drama about Jews or a hard war. This alone suggests that he is worth something. And there really is something to see. Just imagine - the hero kills his woman, leaves evidence and goes to surrender to the police. In any other case, he would have already been convicted, but that was not the case. The fact is that he is the chief of police himself and no one wants to even suggest that it was him. Who said he wants to go to jail? Not at all, he has other plans ...
6. The film "Firemen's Ball"
directed by Milos Forman
The last film of the famous Czechoslovak director filmed in his homeland. And knowing this, one can already assume what could have caught fire in them. That all this red absurdity, this serious circus is like a mirror of the communist regime in which the country lived then. Brave guys, excellent firefighters really set out to hold their own beauty contest at the holiday!
7. The film "Black cat, white cat"
director Emir Kusturica
A sparkling, unrestrained, crazy comedy from the genius of Kusturica! Gypsy fun will also raise the dead from the grave, and what does it do with the living ... Here they shoot and sing at the same time, they love and steal brides, and what they will not do for money. Two old mafiosi are fast asleep as their children fight furiously. But for the sake of the happiness of the young, they, of course, will wake up.
8. The film "Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Atomic Bomb"
director Stanley Kubrick
Intellectual, but no less absurd comedy from the cult director Stanley Kubrick. Imagine a very real situation: the country is allegedly in danger and a military general is sending nuclear bombers to his enemy. But the danger is imaginary, and the planes are already in the air approaching the enemy's borders. And then it also turns out that the enemy has an automatic response - and the country that sent the bombers may have been erased from the Earth to the devil's grandmother ... Did you imagine the seriousness of the situation? This is a tragedy! But not in this case.
9. The film "Castle"
director Alexey Balabanov
The film is, of course, based on the famous novel by Franz Kafka. The hero arriving at his destination discovers that no one is waiting for him and no one needs him here. Metaphorically speaking, a castle under a castle. However, curiosity seizes him, he decides to stop here and try to find out what the matter is. Stays so long that he even manages to get married. But it never makes sense. Or is he just inattentively looking? A phantasmagoria from Balabanov, a ghostly plot and lurid characters, a motley texture of the surrounding world, it would seem that everything is there. But where is the answer to be found then?
10. The film "Tootsie"
director Sydney Pollack
Everything is very simple. The guy can't get a foothold in the film business, he is not taken anywhere. Then he disguises himself as a woman and gets the desired role. But to play, he needs to stop being himself. But he has a girlfriend, and she, of course, has a father. How then to be? In addition, dad suddenly began to like him in a new way ... An awkward situation, isn't it. And no one knows what will happen when the truth breaks out. A crazy comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and the charming Jessica Lange.
For those who want something more serious, we have collected.
Ticket number 24.
Features of the theater of the absurd: origins, representatives, features of the dramatic structure (S. Beckett, E. Ionesco).
Theater of the absurd - a trend in Western European drama and theater, which arose in the middle of the 20th century. In absurd plays, the world is presented as a meaningless, logicless pile of facts, actions, words and destinies. The principles of absurdism were most fully embodied in the dramas The Bald Singer (1950) by the playwright Eugene Ionesco and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.
It is believed that theater of the absurd is rooted in the philosophy of Dadaism, poetry from non-existent words and avant-garde art of the 1910-20s. Despite sharp criticism, the genre gained in popularity after World War II, which pointed to the considerable uncertainty in human life. The introduced term was also criticized, there were attempts to redefine it as "anti-theater" and "new theater". The “theater of the absurd” (or “new theater”) movement apparently originated in Paris as an avant-garde phenomenon associated with small theaters in the Latin Quarter, and after a while gained worldwide recognition.
In practice, theater of the absurd denies realistic characters, situations and all other relevant theatrical techniques. Time and place are indefinite and changeable, even the simplest causal relationships are destroyed. Pointless intrigues, repetitive dialogues and aimless chatter, dramatic inconsistency of actions - everything is subordinated to one goal: to create a fabulous, and maybe even terrible, mood.
The formation of the drama of the absurd was influenced by surreal theatricality: the use of bizarre costumes and masks, meaningless rhymes, provocative appeals to the audience, etc. The plot of the play, the behavior of the characters are incomprehensible, similar and sometimes designed to shock the audience. Reflecting the absurdity of mutual understanding, communication, dialogue, the play stresses in every possible way the lack of meaning in the language, and that, in the form of a kind of game without rules, becomes the main carrier of chaos.
For the absurdists, the dominant quality of being was not concise, but disintegration. The second significant difference from the previous drama is in relation to a person. A person in an absurd world is the personification of passivity and helplessness. He cannot realize anything except his own helplessness. He is deprived of freedom of choice. The absurdists have developed their own concept of drama - antidrama. The drama of the absurd is not a discussion of the absurd, but a demonstration of absurdity.
Eugene Ionesco - the pioneer of absurdism in French drama.
The situations, characters and dialogues of his plays follow images and associations of dreams rather than everyday reality. The language, with the help of funny paradoxes, cliches, sayings and other word games, is freed from the usual meanings and associations. The surrealism of Ionesco's plays traces its origins to circus clownery, films by C. Chaplin, B. Keaton, the Marx brothers, ancient and medieval farce. A typical technique is a pile of objects that threaten to swallow the actors; things take on life, and people turn into inanimate objects. In the absurdist plays, catharsis is absent, E. Ionesco rejects any ideology, but the plays were brought to life by deep concern for the fate of the language and its speakers.
Premiere of "The Bald Singer" took place in Paris. The success of "The Bald Singer" was scandalous, no one understood anything, but watching absurdist plays gradually became good form.
In the anti-play (this is the genre designation), there is no bald singer at all. But there is the English couple Smith and their neighbor by the name of Martin, as well as the maid Mary and the captain of the fire brigade, who accidentally dropped in for a minute to the Smiths. He is afraid to be late for the fire, which will start at such and such hours and some minutes. There is also a clock that strikes as it pleases, which, apparently, means that time is not lost, it simply does not exist, each is in its own time dimension and carries, accordingly, nonsense.
The playwright has several techniques for whipping up the absurd. There is confusion in the sequence of events, and a heap of the same names and surnames, and the spouses' lack of recognition of each other, and the castling of hosts-guests, guests-hosts, countless repetitions of the same epithet, a stream of oxymorons, a clearly simplified construction of phrases like in the English textbook for beginners. In short, the dialogues are really funny.
The situations, characters and dialogues of his plays follow images and associations of dreams rather than everyday reality. Language, with the help of funny paradoxes, cliches, sayings and other word games, is freed from the usual meanings and associations. The surrealism of Ionesco's plays traces its origins to circus clownery, films by C. Chaplin, B. Keaton, the Marx brothers, ancient and medieval farce. A typical technique is a pile of objects that threaten to swallow the actors; things take on life, and people turn into inanimate objects.
When asked about the meaning of his drama, Ionesco replied that he wanted to “explain all the absurdity of existence, the separation of man from his transcendental roots,” to show that “when talking, people no longer know what they wanted to say, and that they are talking so that nothing to say that language, instead of bringing them closer together, only divides them even more ", to reveal" the unusual and strange nature of our existence "and" parade the theater, that is, the world. "
The task of his drama is to create a fierce, unrestrained theater, he proposes to return to theatrical origins, namely to old puppet shows, in which caricatured implausible images are used, emphasizing the roughness of reality itself. Ionesco proclaimed a sharp disagreement with the existing theater, of all the playwrights he recognized only Shakespeare. Contemporary theater, in his opinion, is not capable of expressing the existential state of a person. The theater must move as far as possible from realism, which only obscures the essence of human life.
Beckett.
Beckett was Joyce's secretary and learned to write with him. “Waiting for Godot” is one of the basic texts of absurdism. Entropy is presented in a state of expectation, and this expectation is a process, the beginning and end of which we do not know, i.e. it makes no sense. The state of expectation is the dominant in which the heroes exist, while not wondering whether to wait for Godot. They are in a passive state.
The heroes (Volodya and Tarragon) are not completely sure that they are waiting for Godot in the very place where they need it. When the next day after night they come to the same place to the withered tree, Tarragon doubts that it is the same place. The set of items is the same, only the tree blossomed overnight. Tarragon's boots, which he left on the road yesterday, are in the same place, but he claims that they are larger and of a different color.
Waiting for Godot.
Identification with Christ, the redeemer of human sins, with God the Father. "There is nothing more real than nothing." This is the symbol of Nothing. Nothing for existentialists comes with a plus sign. The central characters are Vladimir and Estragon, vagrants. They are tired of waiting and cannot help but wait. A boy appears and informs him that Godou's appearance is being delayed again. Lucky and Potso are figures, realists, pragmatists, they personify everyday vanity. Owner and E. are forced to eat pasture, they do not have a home, they spend the night in the open air. Lucky and Potso are surrounded by civilization items. But all the characters find in the process of existence only disease.
Vladimir and Estragon are distinguished by emasculated consciousness, they lack education, and Potso and Lucky even think on command. Vladimir and Estragon are friends, but they ask themselves if it is not better for them to live apart. Potso and Lucky also need each other. Different types of human and human development.
None of the options are paying off. Often the characters, if they are looking for something else, are on the other side of the border. Vladimir and Estragon love to look at their own things. They hope to find something there, but they find nothing. They don't try to create something themselves. To see in Nothing not only an expression of weakness, but also an expression of strength.
Beckett is the decline of human nature. Ionesco - the decline of the human spirit.
Lecture 30. New theater (drama of the absurd)
This is a type of contemporary drama (the so-called "New Theater", initially ignored by the public), based on the concept of a person's total alienation from the physical and social environment. This kind of plays first appeared in the early 1950s in France, and then spread to Western Europe and the United States.
This is the theater of "drama of the absurd", created by S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, A. Adamov, who lived in Paris and wrote in French. It was, on the one hand, an attempt to renew the structure and language of the theater, and on the other, the New Theater reflected the horror caused by the atrocities of war and the fear of atomic destruction.
The roots of the theater of the absurd can be found in the theoretical and practical activities of representatives of such aesthetic movements of the early 20th century as Dadaism and Surrealism, as well as in A. Jarri's epic burlesque "King I Kill" (1896), in "Sostsi Tiresias" (1903) by G. Apollinaire, where farce and vaudeville are combined, in the plays of F. Wedekind with the irrational aspirations of his heroes. The theater of the absurd also absorbed the elements of clownery, music hall, Chaplin's comedies.
The formation of the drama of the absurd (antidrama) was influenced by surreal theatricality: the use of bizarre costumes and masks, meaningless rhymes, provocative addresses to the audience, etc. The plot of the play, the behavior of the characters are incomprehensible, similar and sometimes designed to shock the audience. Reflecting the absurdity of mutual understanding, communication, dialogue, the play in every possible way emphasizes the lack of meaning in the language, and that, in the form of a kind of game without rules, becomes the main carrier of chaos.
It was a conceptual drama that realized the ideas of absurdist philosophy. Reality, being was presented as chaos. For the absurdists, the dominant quality of being was not concise, but disintegration. The second significant difference from the previous drama is in relation to a person. A person in an absurd world is the personification of passivity and helplessness. He cannot realize anything except his own helplessness. He is deprived of freedom of choice. The absurdists developed their own concept of drama - anti-drama. Back in the 30s, Antonei Artaud spoke about his perspective of the theater: the rejection of the depiction of a person's character, the theater moves to a total depiction of a person. All the heroes of the drama of the absurd are total people. Events also need to be considered from the point of view of the fact that they are the result of certain situations created by the author, within which a picture of the world opens. The drama of the absurd is not a discussion of the absurd, but a demonstration of absurdity.
UNESCO UNESCO: Eugène Ionesco's talent manifested itself both in his early poems and in critical articles that gave rise to real revolutions and upheavals in Romanian society, but he burns brightest in his theatrical activities.Eugene Ionesco is the pioneer of absurdism in French drama.The Ionesco Theater is a theater of ridicule and parody. Eugene Ionesco put on stage and ridiculed the emptiness and its absurdity of the world. It opposes traditional theatrical vocabulary. Many did not understand this vocabulary, considering it devoid of any meaning, calling his plays "nonsense". But he defended his right and the title of a famous playwright of our century, which is proved by the numerous awards he received. In most of Ionesco's plays, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe uselessness of language as a means of communication is promoted.
“Reality should be enriched with absurdity, fantasy and free self-expression of the individual,” the author himself believes. And I think everyone will agree with that.
The situations, characters and dialogues of his plays follow images and associations of dreams rather than everyday reality. The language, with the help of funny paradoxes, cliches, sayings and other word games, is freed from the usual meanings and associations.
The surrealism of Ionesco's plays traces its origins to circus clownery, films by C. Chaplin, B. Keaton, the Marx brothers, ancient and medieval farce. A typical technique is a pile of objects that threaten to swallow the actors; things take on life, and people turn into inanimate objects.
In the absurdist plays, catharsis is absent, E. Ionesco rejects any ideology, but the plays were brought to life by deep concern for the fate of the language and its speakers.
The most famous plays by Eugene Ionesco are "The Bald Singer" and "The Lesson". These plays denounce the conservatism, morality and ideology of our world. From the first time, it really may seem that you are reading nonsense, but rereading or pondering, you will notice that it is not so absurd in the book, but absurd in reality. Comic passages, "absence" of meaning are juxtaposed with languid reflections on human existence, which is marked by loneliness and death. The play "The King is Dying" tells about these reflections.
For all the conventionality of the theater of the absurd, it is thoroughly politicized, which is especially convincingly proved by the most significant creation of Eugene Ionesco "Rhino" (1959).Ionesco also shows the mechanisms that contribute to the establishment of certain ideologies. Thus, in the play "Rhino", the inhabitants of a small town are metaphorically presented on the stage, worried about the appearance of a rhino and are gradually turning into it. This play denounces totalitarianism.
Eugene Ionesco, like the existentialists J.P. Sartre and A. Camus, explores human behavior in an extreme situation, when the vast majority of people submit to circumstances and only a loner finds the strength for internal confrontation.
A feature of the plays by E. Ionesco is that they are, as it were, encrypted. Sometimes they are difficult to solve, but with "Rhino" everything is clear: the drama is about fascism.
Eugène Ionesco's dramaturgy has taken a prominent place in the literary process and in the repertoire of French and world theater. However, this does not mean at all that absurdism won out and traditional realistic drama left the stage. An ordinary and helpless person in everyday life goes one against everyone.
Literary glory in the early 1950s brought Ionesco play "The Bald Singer", the history of writing which largely reveals the essence of his writing method. Having decided to master the English language in 1948, the writer bought a self-instruction manual and suddenly discovered what a storehouse of absurdity our everyday speech is, especially in relation to reality. And I thought about the original and gradually lost meaning of words. From the juxtaposition of words and meanings, Ionesco's "unpleasant" theater was born, which was later called absurd.However, the absurdity of Ionesco is not a deliberate absurdization of being (Ionesco himself, by the way, preferred to call the artistic direction to which he belonged, the theater of paradox), but the ultimate exposure of its true essence.
The premiere of The Bald Singer took place in Paris. The success of The Bald Singer was scandalous, no one understood anything, but watching absurdist plays gradually became good form.
“Bald girl”. In the drama itself, there is no one who looks like a bald girl. The phrase itself makes sense, but in principle it is meaningless. The play is full of absurdity: 9 o'clock, and the clock strikes 17 times, but no one in the play notices this. Every time you try to fold something, it ends in nothing.
In the anti-play (this is the genre designation), there is no bald singer at all. But there is the English couple Smith and their neighbor by the name of Martin, as well as the maid Mary and the captain of the fire brigade, who accidentally dropped in for a minute to the Smiths. He is afraid of being late for the fire, which will start at such and such hours and some minutes. There is also a clock that strikes as it pleases, which apparently means that time is not lost, it simply does not exist, each is in its own time dimension and carries, accordingly, nonsense.
The playwright has several techniques for whipping up the absurd. There is confusion in the sequence of events, and a heap of the same names and surnames, and the spouses' lack of recognition of each other, and the castling of hosts-guests, guests-hosts, countless repetitions of the same epithet, a stream of oxymorons, a clearly simplified construction of phrases like in the English textbook for beginners. In short, the dialogues are really funny.
Samuel BECKET: Beckett was Joyce's secretary and learned to write with him. “Waiting for Godot” is one of the basic texts of absurdism. Beckett's play Waiting for the Year, staged in 1952, is the most famous play in the theater of the absurd, representing a life devoid of meaning. The fundamental difference between B.'s play from previous dramas that broke with the traditions of psychological theater is that no one previously set out to stage "nothing". B. allows you to develop in the play word by word, despite the fact that the conversation begins all of a sudden, and does not come to anything, as if the characters initially know that it will not work out to agree on anything, that wordplay is the only option for communication and convergence. Dialogue becomes an end in itself. But the play also has a certain dynamic. Everything is repeated, changing just enough to warm up the audience's expectation of some kind of change.
Entropy (the release of energy in a reaction, a chemical term) is presented in a state of expectation, and this expectation is a process, the beginning and end of which we do not know, i.e. it makes no sense. The state of expectation is the dominant in which the heroes exist, while not thinking about whether to wait for Godot. They are in a passive state.
The play Waiting for Godot is one of those works that influenced the overall look of the 20th century theater. Beckett basically refuses any dramatic conflict, the plotline familiar to the viewer. The characters of the play - Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) - look like two clowns, having nothing to do, entertaining each other and at the same time the audience. They do not act, but imitate some action. It is not aimed at revealing the psychology of the characters. The action does not develop linearly, but moves in a circle, clinging to the refrains that one accidentally dropped replica generates. Not only remarks are repeated, but also positions. At the beginning of Act 2, the tree, the only attribute of the landscape, is covered with leaves, but the essence of this event eludes the characters and spectators. This is not a sign of spring, the progressive movement of time. Rather emphasizes the falsehood of expectations.
The heroes (Volodya and Estragon) are not completely sure that they are waiting for Godot in the very place where they need it. When the next day after night they come to the same place to the withered tree, Tarragon doubts that it is the same place. The set of items is the same, only the tree blossomed overnight. Tarragon's boots, which he left on the road yesterday, are in the same place, but he claims that they are larger and of a different color.
The play is seen as the quintessence of Beckett: behind the longing and horror of human existence in its most unsightly form, an inevitable irony appears. The characters in the play are reminiscent of the Maris brothers, the great comedians of silent films.
Waiting for Godot. Summary
Country road, endless fields, almost desert, whose monotony is broken only by one tree. There are almost no leaves on the tree. There are two tramps at its foot.
Tarragon, unsuccessfully trying to take off his shoes and his friend and brother Vladimir. He is worried about which of the four evangelists told the truth about the two crucified robbers. A series of banal phrases, devoid of any meaning, which are exchanged only in order to revive the silence of this dull place. The only thing that keeps them here is the promise of a certain Godou to come. What is left for them to do while waiting, if not to kill time, endless time that needs to be filled with empty arguments, and at the same time pretend that they take them to heart ... They themselves do not know why they are together, they are used to parting and dating every day in the same place. The noise is somewhere in the other direction, a terrible cry ... Isn't Godou coming? Tarragon drops the carrot, which he chewed before, freezes, rushes towards ...
Pozzo and Luke appear. The latter has a rope around his neck; he carries his master's suitcases. Pozzo, whip in hand, treats his slave in the same way that animals are not treated. And if Vladimir and Estragon are here, why not stop and smoke a pipe? It will kill time, and Pozzo loves to talk. He explains that he is going to sell Luke, who is no longer good for anything. He can only think. In addition, it carries with it if you push it. Finally, it is enough to take off his hat for him to become an animal again, a simpleton. They stay for quite a long time, then go away with a bang.
What to do? Leave? No, Godou promised to come, you need to wait for him. Resigned to fate, Vladimir and Estragon are trying to discuss the insignificant events that marked the day, but they do not have the strength, they are tired to successfully play a comedy of imaginary interest.
A voice is heard from behind the curtains: "Mister (...)". A child comes and says that Godot will not come, as in previous evenings, but he will definitely be tomorrow. Tomorrow comes, all the same meaningless dialogues, without meaning, a repetition of yesterday's conversation, or maybe the day before yesterday, and daily. Luke and Pozzo reappear, they have aged; Pozzo is blind, and Luke is even more worthless, he is dumb. But the rope is still there, a little shorter so that Pozzo can follow his slave, who is now wearing a new hat.
At the sight of Vladimir and Estragon, Luke makes a sharp dash and falls, dragging Pozzo along. Pozzo is calling for help, that's who is really funny! Besides, it wastes time. Two vagabonds pounce on Pozzo, kick him, pick him up - you need to have fun, talk ... As for Godot, he again sends an apology, he will come tomorrow; maybe the way out is to hang on a tree on the belt of Tarragon? But the belt breaks ...
So what! They'll be back tomorrow with a good rope, and if Godou suddenly comes, they'll be saved ...
STOPPARD: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” - here is a characteristic feature of English literature: the British were well aware of their history, every writer feels like a part of this tradition. This play has 2 readings: 1) either the action takes place after the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; 2) either it all seems to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But the play is based on Shakespearean thought. There is nothing in the replicas of the heroes that would allow us to distinguish one from the other. Stoppard uses this characteristic. In the center of the play is the question "which of us is Rosencrantz, and who is Guildenstern?" These are 2 human beings who have names that distinguish one from the other. For them, to understand who is who means an opportunity to stand out, to find their “I”. But according to the theory of absurdism, this is impossible, so the absurdists do not give names to their heroes. Man is not given to separate his “I” from chaos.
The foregoing, in our opinion, gives grounds to assert that it is inappropriate to speak of any crisis, at least in relation to the theater of the 20th century. True, one cannot discount one phenomenon of the 20th century, which can be considered a manifestation of the crisis, but not of culture. The growth of well-being due to the scientific and technological revolution of the overwhelming majority of the population of Europe, the establishment of democratic tendencies in life led to the actual power in this life of the uncreative majority, unable to live with the ideas and ideals of true culture, unable to rise above the world of everyday life, and this anti-elitism of the majority of the population did not creativity-oriented, culturally destructive.
A manifestation of this trend, starting from the 60s of the XX century. throughout Europe, including France, is the development of show business. Mass circulation of records, cassettes of "disco", "folk", "rock" music, from morning to evening, rattling in the headphones of transistors, everywhere accompany boys and girls1.
However, along with the spread of show business and other negative phenomena in the spiritual life of Europe in the XX century. the culture that elevates a person continues to exist and develop, which is the criterion of its authenticity, regardless of the genre.
Search for new theatrical forms
Theatrical life in France, as well as in Europe as a whole, has become more diverse in the last two decades. In Paris alone, there are currently over 50 theaters, in which the viewer can find performances for every taste: from the eternal creations of the classics - Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Chekhov - in the Comedie Française and Odeon to modern playwrights Beckett and Ionesco in the avant-garde theaters and witty comedies in the "theaters of the boulevards". Theater festivals are held annually in Avignon, Orange, Nimes and other cities in France on ancient Roman arenas or in medieval castles, attracting thousands of spectators from many countries.
Such spectacular events are practiced in Italy: on the ruins of the Forum, the Colosseum, the Thermal Baths of Caracalla, amazing performances are held, staging of classical Italian operas on ancient subjects. Thus, the staging of Verdi's opera Aida in the Baths of Caracalla creates an exciting feeling of the viewer's presence in the thick of the events.
All this is a search for new theatrical forms accessible to the mass of spectators. An example of such a combination of mass and classics is R. Ossein's grandiose performances at the Paris Palace of Sports of the performances Notre Dame Cathedral, Danton and Robespierre, The Man from Nazareth, and Battleship Potemkin.
Claude Carrer, in collaboration with the famous English director Peter Brook, staged the ancient Indian epic "Mahabharata" at the Boof du Nord theater in Paris. The scale of this performance is evidenced by the fact that it ran either for three evenings, or for twelve hours in a row from 12 noon to 12 noon. Spectators, who came from many European countries, stocked up thermos with coffee and sandwiches and “heroically hatched to the end,” as the Parisian newspapers wrote in 1986, when this performance was staged.
1 Doctors note an increase in the disorder due to this reason of the hearing aid in young people.
New articles
- "The Appearance of Christ to the People" Ivanov Impression of the picture the Appearance of Christ to the People
- "The human and fantastic world in the story of Turgenev" Bezhin lug Mysticism in the story of bezhin lug
- Images of peasants in the poem "Who Lives Well in Russia
- “Why I like Andersen's tales Why do you think everyone loves Andersen's tales
- Characteristics of the hero Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
- Why Tolstoy couldn't write a novel about the Decembrists
- The meaning of the name of A. Ostrovsky's drama "The Thunderstorm". Composition: The meaning of the title of the drama by A.N. Ostrovsky's "Thunderstorm" The originality of the drama "Thunderstorm"
- Characteristics of Plyushkin in the poem "Dead Souls": a description of appearance and character All about Plyushkin from dead souls
- "Little Tsakhes, nicknamed Zinnober" by Hoffmann: description and analysis of the story. Problems of the short story.
- The play "Thunderstorm" and its heroes
Popular articles
- Class hour "We are different, but we are together" (4th grade)
- Description of the manilova village in the poem "dead souls"
- Friendship of Bazarov and Arcadia briefly quotes
- Prisoner of the Caucasus analysis of the work
- The composition "The moral problems of the story A
- Pechorin and Grushnitsky: characteristics of heroes
- Gogol "The Inspector General" - analysis
- Interesting facts Grigory Melekhov analysis of the hero
- Composition: description of painting A
- Overcoat - analysis of the work Analysis of works of art n in gogol overcoat