Episodes on Artaud, Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, and Heiner Müller explore absurdism, ritual, fragmentation, silence, and avant-garde challenges to conventional drama.
Antonin Artaud enters the story of theatre like a jolt of electricity into a dead nerve. In the 1920s and 30s, this French poet-actor raged against “civilized” theatre, insisting that beneath society’s polite masks…
In a Harold Pinter play, what isn’t said often matters more than what is. A pause can last an eternity; a simple phrase like “Come in” can carry a threat. Pinter’s dramatic world is…
Eugène Ionesco found the absurdity of life not in grand philosophical statements but in the petty routines of everyday people. A man and woman sit in armchairs, trading banal phrases about the weather and…
Jean Genet strolls into the theatre carrying a lifetime of defiance. Here is a man who spent his youth as a thief, vagrant, and outcast, a gay man and ex-convict who inverted society’s judgments…
A pair of tramps on a country road, waiting by a bare tree for a man who never comes – this is Samuel Beckett’s contribution to theatre, and it changed the course of drama.…
East Berlin, 1961. The auditorium of the Volksbühne theatre is packed to the rafters on a damp autumn night. A new play called Die Umsiedlerin (“The Resettler Woman”) is making its debut, and whispers…
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