Absurdist Theater: Albee and Stoppard Compared

The Absurdist Tradition and American Drama

The European movement toward absurdism recognized the explicit pain and irrationality that coincide to form the human experience. A sense of coping with meaninglessness drove the work of writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Across the Atlantic, playwrights such as Edward Albee applied this absurdity to a distinctly American sense of emptiness, as is demonstrated in his most prominent work.

George's Resistance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

The loud melodrama of Edward Albee's famous 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? proceeds from the premise that human beings at their most combative, depraved, and vulnerable may also be those standing at the height of an opportunity for revelation. From one perspective, this is an opportunity that lead character George seizes through a graduating series of personal incarnations, ultimately helping to usher in some resolution to what seems an insurmountable animus toward his wife, Martha. As they play out their horrific verbal fencing match in front of their party guests, George and Martha exacerbate the tensions in their failing relationship until they reach a mutual breaking point.

Though throughout this emotional sparring there are severe twists, ultimately there is a linear and logical fashion to the momentum of Albee's play. George eventually determines the terminal direction, quite contrary to the submissiveness his character displays when the audience first encounters him. This defining moment is woven into George's own remarks: "there are limits. I mean, a man can put up with only so much without he descends a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder, which is up your line. Now, I will hold your hand when it's dark and you're afraid of the boogeyman and I will tote your gin bottles out after midnight so no one can see but I will not light your cigarette. And that, as they say, is that" (Albee 89). In this sense, the speech demonstrates a man resisting the onslaught of submission caused by the absurd senselessness of life.

Stoppard's Inversion of Hamlet

In Shakespeare's classic play Hamlet, the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — two of Hamlet's closest confidants — are little more than a glossed-over detail. In Tom Stoppard's 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, this marginal status is countered by an inversion of Hamlet's perspective. Placing the two overlooked characters at the center of his play, Stoppard offers an examination quite contrary to that of a man paralyzed by conflicting passions. Instead, we find two highly actionable and yet passionless men.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard fleshes out two men inevitably bound to their fates by the passions and wills of those around them, creating a compelling discussion on the balance between fate and free will. He develops twin personas through whom the passive complacency of man is examined, with basic impulses of self-preservation, concession to authority, and a willingness to be moved by the desires of others ruling idle lives inexorably approaching deaths that will be overlooked by all.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Passive Figures

Introduced in one of their frequent, pointless games, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately reveal themselves as internally contradictory figures. Clearly intended as comical figures in the spirit of Shakespeare's classic fools, the two Stoppard characters are nonetheless capable of offering some of the most accurate statements regarding their own circumstances. Guildenstern makes the jocular and accusatory allegation to Rosencrantz that "at least we can still count on self-interest as a predictable factor" (Stoppard 14). In context, this remark functions as a sarcastic observation on his friend's sideways logic regarding a frivolous coin-flipping wager. However, within the larger world of the play, it carries an added level of significance.

As with much of what both title characters have to offer in their observations, this statement is a profundity shrouded in the witlessness of its beholder. For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — two pawns contained within the focus of Stoppard's play — it is difficult to decipher any motive for their behaviors other than self-interest. Their bungling incognizance renders both incapable of truly preserving even this. Yet when Guildenstern declares that self-interest is "the last to go," there is a portentous irony that he and his partner will themselves face. At all points moved by the interests of others, and made all the more impotent by their apparent co-dependency upon each other as existing figures in Hamlet's world, the two do not resist the relegation of their own ambitions. Rather, they commission themselves readily to whatever roles are thrust upon them. In this way, Stoppard creates two tragic figures that reflect the philosophical idleness of the average man, using their baseness, incomprehension, and apathy to offer a broader critique of society.

Conclusion

Together, Albee and Stoppard illustrate two distinct human responses to the absurdity of existence. Where George seizes a moment of defiant clarity, asserting his limits against the chaos of his marriage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drift passively toward their fated ends, unable — or unwilling — to exercise the free will that might alter their course. Both plays, rooted in the absurdist tradition, ultimately interrogate what it means to confront a meaningless world, and the very different ways human beings choose, or fail, to respond.

Works Cited

Albee, E. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Signet, 1962.

Stoppard, T. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Grove Press, 1991.