A unique book of criticism that brings both theatre and film studies within a single theoretical framework Martin Esslin is the author of seminal critical studies such as The Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht: A Choice of Evils. Covering artists as diverse as Duchamp and Brecht, Busby Berkely and Con[...]
In 1958 The Birthday Party was dismissed by all but a few critics and closed after one week's run in London. Since then Harold Pinter has come to be acknowledged as "our best living playwright" (Irving Wardle, The Times) Martin Esslin's study of Pinter's plays has become a standard work since its pu[...]
A study of the playwrights who have dramatised the absurdity of the human condition. Esslin seeks to show how Beckett; Ionesco; Genet; Pinter and others have confronted a world in which there is no communication and where man flounders in a void; cut off from his roots and shorn of all certaintie[...]
A new edition of the playwrights and plays that have shaped the evolution of the "Theatre of the Absurd" introduces developments in the contemporary theater that reflect changing attitudes toward the world, looking at the work of such playwrights as Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others. Repri[...]
The 'Theatre of the Absurd' has become a familiar term to describe a group of radical European playwrights - writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eug ne Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter - whose dark, funny and humane dramas wrestled profoundly with the meaningless absurdity of the human condition. I[...]