Footfalls
Plays written in our time have in a similar way represented the multiple faces and styles of our contemporary world. However, two broad performance styles – realism and theatricalism- have dominated the modern theater. One adheres to a candid representation of everyday reality, and the other uses the stage to call attention to life’s theatricality. Playwrights, responding to changing philosophical, economic, social, and theatrical ideas, developed new dramaturgical conventions to express their changing vision of the universe. Samuel Beckett helped pioneer a new way of expressing an ‘absurd’ universe that resulted in another full-fledged theater movement – the theater of the absurd. This term coined by Martin Esslin in 1961 and is sometimes defined as “a metaphysical no man’s land in which mankind is condemned to the freedom of having to give reasoning to his own existence”. Absurdist playwrights neither argue nor debate life’s absurdities. The playwrights of the absurd made their breakthrough in dramatic form by presenting, without comment or moral judgement, situations showing life’s senselessness and irrationality.