After Paranoia, What Next?

Extract

It is of course only the playwrights who can show us the next phase in our theatre, and even they can't tell us about it in advance. They have to work it out according to their own temperament, experience, and taste, taking what advantage they can of the shifting sanctions of fashion. The by-stander can neither prophesy, nor tell the playwrights what to do. So, these remarks are offered as remote wishful thinking.

If there is a dominant fashion in playwrighting now, it consists in exploiting the mentally and morally underprivileged, the lonely, frustrated, and pathological, to express the playwright's own desperate feelings about “our times.” As Mr. Martin Esslin says in his excellent Theatre of the Absurd, “A feeling of helplessness when confronted with the vast intricacy of the modern world, and the individual's impotence in making his own influence felt on that intricate and mysterious machinery, pervades the consciousness of Western man today…. The convict who is being physically separated from the outside world has literally been deprived of any means to make his presence felt, to make an impact on reality; and in that sense the convict experiences the human condition in our time more intensely and more directly than any of us.” What Mr. Esslin is saying here about Genet's convict applies to countless other lost figures in the contemporary theatre. And our American playwrights, whether Absurd, Beatnik, Freudian-day-dreamy, or reportorial-realistic, are portentously dredging up sad-sacks of every description as the real low-down on “the chaos of the modern world.”