Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd

An innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which seeks to address these issues by reconfiguring 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, Gombrowicz, Kantor, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully reconfigures the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text "The Theatre of the Absurd," which is commonly recognized as one of the most important scholarly publications of the twentieth century. By reading the Theatre of the Absurd as an emergent form of ecological theatre that expresses deep environmental anxiety, this companion radically reinterprets the meaning of absurdism for the twenty-first-century audiences.