[ebooks] Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination: An Artist at Work by Ghislaine Kenyon in Arts-Photography

Description

In 1953; Samuel Beckettrsquo;s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years; it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponentsmdash;Beckett; Ionesco; Genet; Pinter; and othersmdash;shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism; while highlighting their charactersrsquo; inability to understand one another. In 1961; Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition.Over four decades after its initial publication; Esslinrsquo;s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckettrsquo;s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative; engaging; and eminently readable; The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.