01529--the absurd

The 'absurd' is a term derived from the existentialism of Albert Camus which stands for the modern sense of human purposelessness in a universe without meaning or value.  The critic Martin Esslin coined the phrase theatre of the absurd in 1961 to refer to a number of dramatists of the 1950s (led by Samuel Beckett and Eugene lonesco) whose works evoke the absurd by abandoning logical form, character, and dialogue together with realistic illusion.