Part III - Removed from Existence. An Existential Crisis in Dramatic Form

Summary

Martin Esslin was making his discoveries of the “absurdity in the countries of the East” gradually, following, albeit with a delay, the traces of the local fascination with political relevance of post-Beckett and post-Ionesco dramas.

The eastern version of the theatre of the absurd first appeared in Poland, after 1956, while Czechoslovakia did not experience a “thaw” immediately after Stalin's death and had to wait for Mrożek's (in print) and Havel's works (on stage) until 1963, and for the Parisian avant-garde in the repertoire of Czech theatres two years longer, i.e. until 1965.

The situation was also different in Hungary, where no “thaw” in the Polish sense followed the revolution of 1956. The first “absurdist” (in the critics’ opinion) Hungarian drama noticed by Esslin was Istvan Örkeny's The Tot Family, written in 1964. In turn, in Yugoslavia, where censorship was not as strict as in the Soviet camp, “the theatre of the absurd remained in a lethargic state” as there was no need for an Aesopian style.

Hence, one can say that the Eastern theatre of the absurd fully formed only in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But also in those countries it developed independently of the neighborly connections, as it appeared and had its moment of glory in each country at different points in time. The could only appear uniform from an external, distant, perspective—within an ideological frame assumed in advance.

It is worth noting that as early as 1963 Esslin drew attention to the paradoxical combination within the theatre of the absurd of Marxist, existentialist and post-Wittgenstein philosophies (for example in the questioning of the importance of language as a communication tool).

Also John Gassner (critical of Esslin's theoretical systematics) wrote in the mid-1960s about the emerging possibility of a marriage between the ideas of naturists, absurdists and Marxists.

Perhaps for such ideological reasons, until recently in Poland, a country defined by Mrożek as being “east of the West and west of the East,” the concept of the absurd itself as a descriptive category for native dramaturgy was approached with distrust. The early works by Mrożek or Różewicz started to be treated separately from Western absurdist works and instead came to be viewed in terms of their clash with Romanticism.