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Thus, at the center of the contemporary stage remains the European drama represented by Beckett, lonesco, Genet, Pinter and Osborne. None are alike; yet all raise a hemlock toast to the 20th century. Theirs is a drama of metaphysical anguish, rigorous negation, asocial stance, skin-prickling guilt and anxiety, and abidingly absurd humor. In their plays, the situation of man is horrible and funny at the same time. Ionesco says that man laughs so as not to cry. The problem these playwrights pose is man's oldest and newest—the existence problem.
Why should existence be a problem? These playwrights begin with one major premise—the absence of God. Their despair and their task are to fashion a post-Christian ethos, to find a meaning for life without supernatural sanctions. Man, as they see him, is a creature trapped between two voids, prenatal and posthumous, on a shrinking spit of sand he calls time.
All of these playwrights are obliquely related to the greatest theatrical influence of the 20th century, though perhaps not its greatest playwright—Bertolt Brecht. Despite his seemingly stubborn Marxism, Brecht is intimately concerned with the existence problem. His plays are drenched in fatality, and to call fate "economic necessity" is to change the name without changing the game. While they do not all belong to the theater of the absurd, these playwrights possess that initial recognition of absurdity that, Camus argues, comes to one in the midst of deadening routines. In the opening scene of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Jimmy Porter hurls a newspaper to the floor and says: "Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week's. Different books—same reviews." What begins with the existential why is an awareness of man's incongruous relationship to the universe, of estrangement from his fellows, of aloneness within his family, of the inadequacy of language, the dearth of feeling and the unnerving pressure of physical objects. It is a view of man as a solitude, an island, a kind of Robinson crucified, with the ultimate unmeaning—death—lying ahead.
It might be thought that this heightened consciousness of man's fate would spur some new heroic attitude, and in a minimal way it has. For "Credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd]" these playwrights substitute: I will endure, knowing it is absurd. This is a far cry from the vaulting heroes of past tragedy. The tragic hero must bear full responsibility for his acts, and that is what makes him a thing of the past. Modern intellectual man sees himself as the plaything of powers beyond his reach and shrugs along with Hamlet: "The time is out of joint." The modern mind reduces tragedy to accident and prefers to believe in chance, which is a parody of destiny.
The need to measure chaos with chaos pits the serious modern playmaker against the traditional function of Western art, which T. S. Eliot defined as "imposing a credible order on ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality." By contrast, it is the deliberate intent of modern theater art to bring the playgoer to a condition of inner turmoil, anguish and revolt.
Kyrie Without God