Decolonisation and the Theatre of the Absurd

This chapter takes an explicitly decolonial approach to Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961/1969) and its totalising, imperialist perspectives. Our contention is that an uncritical reliance on Esslin’s overly universalised, depoliticising framework particularly obscures what are sometimes explicit representations of colonially inflected violence in the drama Esslin categorises as ‘absurd.’ Esslin builds his theorisation of the Theatre of the Absurd entirely around a pantheon of white European and North American playwrights and ignores the crucial informing context of anti-colonial revolutions and imperial disintegrations that characterised these playwrights’ political milieu. As a result, Esslin insistently transmutes specific local contexts into generalised comments on ‘the human condition.’ Although scholars are already widening the field of absurd theatre beyond Esslin’s white European focus, decolonising the field cannot work only by adding new plays and writers into the canon: we also need to probe the colonial-inflected thinking imbedded in Esslin’s articulation of ‘the absurd’, how scholars deploy that theory, and which thus risks perpetuating imperialist interpretations. Here, we emphasise how the plays that Esslin named the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ repeatedly dialogue with then-ongoing anti-imperial struggles – engagement which has too often been overlooked because of the shadow cast by Esslin’s depoliticising, universal vision of ‘absurdity’. If we are to continue using Esslin’s ‘absurd’ as a critical lens, we need to push back against the politics this lens reifies: its excessively abstracted vision of ‘humanity’ that ignores the (anti-)colonial detail in many of the foundational ‘absurd’ works of Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet.