Staging the Cold War in the Sixties: Pinter, Albee and Weiss

• Main Authors: Chung, Ai-Ting, 鍾艾庭
• Other Authors: Lim, Kien Ket
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4duj2a

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 104 === The thesis is an explication of the Theatre of the Absurd in the context of the Cold War in the sixties. It is going to revisit three plays—Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (1957, premiered in 1960), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962, premiered in the same year) and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1963, premiered in 1964)—all of which are discussed in Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd. This thesis seeks to pin down their relationship with the Cold War, as the political tension therein gives absurdity a new meaning which is worth studying. Chapter one begins with Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, to compare and contrast it with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which Esslin declares “marked the emergence of a new type of theatre.” In his book The Theatre of the Absurd, the playwrights—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter and others—depict the human condition of absurdity such as futility after the world wars, and the lack of communication, and the doubt of being. But the menace and cynical atmosphere of Pinter’s play could hardly be found in Beckett’s play. The language of Pinter and later playwrights no longer functions as absurdist purposeless fragments; it becomes a medium to spy, to predict actions, or even to attack others. Chapter two follows the argument that the Theatre of the Absurd has changed in the sixties due to the increasingly nervous political atmosphere. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an example of the absurdist theatre becoming a vessel to convey, rather than contemplate on, that atmosphere. Its allegorical naming of the characters and the games of tactics indicate the Cold War. Albee not only writes a family drama but one that connotes the brinksmanship between the nations and the fear of deserting one’s illusions to face the reality. The last chapter focuses on Weiss’s Marat/Sade, which mixes reality with fiction, interpreting the eighteenth-century French Revolution in the context of the Cold War in the sixties. The play is a combination of a little bit of everything—Brechtian, Artuadian, and absurdist. The focus of this chapter would be the absurdist elements that are tied to the Cold War, showing how Weiss converts his life experience in exile into the energy of protesting his political point of view in Marat/Sade. The absurdity of staging the Cold War in the sixties no longer centers on the senselessness and the looping repetition of the human loneliness. Instead, the playwrights who capture the Zeitgeist during the peak of the Cold War have revealed in their plays the senselessness of the Cold War ideology, espionage and psychological uneasiness.