Theatre

August is upon us and so is the silly season. In the papers it’s Parliament out and flying pigs in, so it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate time for Absurdism to make a comeback. Douglas Hodge, director of ‘Absurdia’ – a triple-bill of British Absurdist comedies at the Donmar Warehouse – chuckles over the ‘very apt’ timing of his opening night, a ‘happy accident’ rather than witty programming. ‘It’s one of those genres which takes over,’ he laughs. ‘My whole life has become slightly absurd’.
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But it’s not just Hodge; revivals of Ionesco abound: ‘Macbett’ was recently staged by the RSC, while ‘Rhinoceros’ will get its first major UK revival this autumn, in a new translation by Martin Crimp. Two plays by the very British humorist NF Simpson are to be staged at the Donmar; and a new Simpson play was given a staged reading at the Royal Court last month. And Crimp is not the only contemporary playwright dipping his pen in the genre: Anthony Neilson and Caryl Churchill have both produced Absurdist-influenced works in recent years.

It is a standing joke that proponents of Absurdist theatre are so various that trying to define it can be an exercise in absurdity. ‘We’ve deliberately avoided that blanket term,’ explains Dominic Cooke, artistic director of the Royal Court, where ‘Rhinoceros’, Ionesco’s classic in which all the people in a small town gradually turn into rhinoceroses, will be staged. ‘It’s a play about how dangerous orthodoxy is; how dangerous systems of thought are because they cut people off from their innate human responses. Absurdism implies that we live in an absurd universe and there’s nothing to do about it, but Ionesco’s play has a hugely positive ending, he picks up a gun to go to fight the rhinoceroses.’ Though Cooke’s not exactly expecting his audiences to follow suit, he does think that ‘these are political plays which use metaphor, rather than realism, as a theatrical form of expression, and it’s naturally a great strength of the theatre that we explore collectively what these metaphors mean to us now. You could apply Ionesco’s critique of orthodoxy to consumerism, aspiration, or political fundamentalism.’

Cooke – forthright and fizzing with energy – seems light years away from the kind of formal pessimism normally associated with classical absurdist drama, and especially Beckett’s. His edgy sense of political pertinence is in turn different in tone, though not perhaps in purpose, from the gentler humour of NF Simpson, whose ’60s suburban comedies form two parts of the Donmar’s triple-bill. Douglas Hodge sees Simpson as having very broad appeal: the middle-aged couples he sketches are miffed by the fact that their new elephant, rather than their new fridge, is too big, but, Hodge says, ‘those couples are sitting on the edge of cliffs all over England, with rain on the windscreen, waiting for something to come, wondering what to do, touched and scared and under siege from the outside.’

Certainly, Hodge’s sense that ‘the human situation is essentially absurd’ is as much at the core of ‘Waiting for Godot’ as it is in newer Absurdist work, such as Caryl Churchill’s ‘Blue Kettle’, where the words ‘blue’ and ‘kettle’ gradually infiltrate the conversations between a middle-aged con-man and the elderly ladies he deceives; or Anthony Neilson’s ‘The Wonderful World of Dissocia’, in which the heroine is an adult Alice in a flying car, exploring the absurdly dark world of her own fantasies.

‘I think the move away from realism and the dogmatic is beginning to happen,’ says Neilson, who is currently devising a new play about madness with the RSC. ‘Resistance to the clash of tones, to putting low humour with high art, these are the sorts of things Ionesco challenged.

'Sophistication and puerility can exist within one person; when in reality you can have a hugely talented physicist blowing away aliens all day on a PlayStation, finding a form which encompasses the extremes of life will inevitably lead to a kind of Absurdism.’ For Neilson, it’s ‘about going deeper artistically’ but also about ‘addressing what life is now – including virtual life.’ It remains to be seen whether the interest in the absurd which Neilson and Hodge both perceive is ‘in the ether’ will thicken into a new movement. But Neilson hopes that a subversive theatrical imagination can get to the bottom of virtual life, to the feeling of being ‘so divorced from our reality that it’s like a strange dream that someone’s having in our vicinity.’ He ends on a note of optimism which also sounds suspiciously like a warning: ‘When a generation comes into ascendancy that takes this stuff seriously, you’ll begin to really see what it can do.’

‘Absurdia’ is playing at the Donmar Warehouse.