Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter

Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd, which suggests that “absurd” plays purport the meaninglessness of life, Michael Y. Bennett’s Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd is a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre “movements” of the 20th century. Bennett argues that these “absurd” plays are, instead, ethical texts that suggest how life can be made meaningful. Analyzing the works of five major playwrights/writers of the 1950s (including three winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature), Bennett’s work challenges fifty years of scholarship though his upbeat and hopeful readings.