At the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism: The absurd theatre

In the aftermath of the two world wars, the societies have changed in such a way that answering the questions regarding the human existence using solely reason had become impractical. The progressive view that modernism has been promoting to people was shattered and the reliability of reason was lost. The devastations caused by the wars drastically affected individuals as well as whole industrialized societies. In this study, the effects of modernism and postmodernism to the art of theatre were broadly investigated. The proven stylistic properties of the futurist, surrealist, expressionist and dadai就 approaches that have emerged between these two periods as a reaction to the rules of traditional theatre were discussed using several related plays as study cases. The common themes of desperation and the inability to communicate that manifest themselves in the daily lives of common people, which have turned to people in crowds, constitute the main subjects of absurd theatre. The stylistic, characteristics and the theme of an inability to communicate were studied by examining plays written by the most significant playwrights of absurd theatre, namely Samuel Beckett^ Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. The absurd playwrights whose work focused largely on the idea of existentialism and who have emerged independently were presented under the same classification and a final conclusion was drawn accordingly. Keywords: absurd theatre, themes of absurd theatre, tecniques of absurd theatre