Description:
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shephard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole.
The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.Brief description: Mark Taylor-Batty is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds, in the UK. He is co-author with Juliette Taylor-Batty, of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and has authored two further books on Harold Pinter's writings.
Review Quotes:
"[CC] This collection of eight critical essays invites reinterpretation of a group of playwrights loosely fitting into a genre initially endorsed by Martin Esslin in his groundbreaking The Theatre of the Absurd (1961). Deviating from the existential and ontological focus associated with writings about this dramatic phenomenon of the 20th century, the contributors to this book attempt to recalibrate the historical excitement by framing readings with a 21st-century environmental and ecological lens and looking beyond Esslin's classic definition ... [T]he arguments and the connections made here are effective in bringing the ecological issues to the foreground ... Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." --CHOICE
"Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh's edited collection, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage is a major reconsideration of the school of theatre that lent its name to Martin Esslin's highly influential The Theatre of the Absurd in 1960. Here they resituate and reassess the term through a consideration of the ecological and environmental implications set up by this group of dramatists." --The Year's Work in English Studies