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    Amedee As An Absurdist PLay

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    Asim Jatt
    The play Amedee by Eugene Ionesco is considered an absurdist drama. It features a man and woman who have lived with a dead body in their bedroom for 13 years that has been growing increasingly large, taking over their home. The play depicts the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence through its ridiculous plot and characters. Key elements of the absurdist theater movement like lack of logic, communication, and resolution are demonstrated in Amedee.

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    Amedee As An Absurdist PLay

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    Asim Jatt
    887 views1 page
    The play Amedee by Eugene Ionesco is considered an absurdist drama. It features a man and woman who have lived with a dead body in their bedroom for 13 years that has been growing increasingly large, taking over their home. The play depicts the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence through its ridiculous plot and characters. Key elements of the absurdist theater movement like lack of logic, communication, and resolution are demonstrated in Amedee.

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    Amedee As an Absurdist PLay

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    The play Amedee by Eugene Ionesco is considered an absurdist drama. It features a man and woman who have lived with a dead body in their bedroom for 13 years that has been growing increasingly large, taking over their home. The play depicts the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence through its ridiculous plot and characters. Key elements of the absurdist theater movement like lack of logic, communication, and resolution are demonstrated in Amedee.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    887 views1 page

    Amedee As An Absurdist PLay

    Uploaded by

    Asim Jatt
    The play Amedee by Eugene Ionesco is considered an absurdist drama. It features a man and woman who have lived with a dead body in their bedroom for 13 years that has been growing increasingly large, taking over their home. The play depicts the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence through its ridiculous plot and characters. Key elements of the absurdist theater movement like lack of logic, communication, and resolution are demonstrated in Amedee.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    AMEDEE AS AN ABSURDIST PLAY

    Ionesco is universally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of Theatre of the Absurd drama. It
    mercilessly exposes man’s loneliness and purposelessness of human existence just like we find in the Caretaker
    and Waiting for Godot. His Amedee beautifully and skillfully shows the essential hopelessness faced by man in
    the cosmos.
    The Theatre of the Absurd is a movement made up of many diverse plays, most of which were written
    between 1940 and 1960. When first performed, these plays shocked their audiences as they were startlingly
    different than anything that had been previously staged. In fact, many of them were labelled as “anti-plays.” In
    an attempt to clarify and define this radical movement, Martin Esslin coined the term “The Theatre of the
    Absurd” in his 1960 book of the same name. He defined it as such, because all of the plays emphasized the
    absurdity of the human condition. Ionesco’s Amedee has all the characteristics of an absurdist drama. Two
    themes that reoccur frequently throughout absurdist dramas are a meaningless world and the isolation of the
    individual.

    Even the more realistic characters in the later plays perform meaningless and mechanical activities.
    Amédée is caught up in the senseless repetition of the play he is writing, and of which he never gets beyond the
    third speech. Madeleine is tangled in the wires of her job as telephone receptionist. And both of them have
    accepted mechanically, without thinking, the presence of the body in their apartment. In fact, they no longer can
    remember who it is, or where it came from. And this is sheer absurdity that the dramatist has shown us.

    In Amédée or How to Get Rid of It (1953), the dead love of Amédée and Madeleine, their bitter and
    quarrelsome relationship, is represented by a cadaver (corpse or dead body) which they discovered in their
    bedroom some fifteen years ago. It is stricken with “geometric progression,” and has been growing ever since.
    Moreover large mushrooms have been sprouting in the bedroom where the body is kept. Suddenly the body
    starts growing at a fast rate, and huge toadstools spring up in the living room as well. By the end of the second
    act the corpse stretches across the entire stage, ready to knock a hole in the front door by the force of its ever-
    growing feet. Amédée and Madeleine have been forced to make space by piling the furniture in a corner of the
    room, and are scarcely visible any longer, so much are they dominated by the deadweight of their meaningless
    life together, crowded out of house and home by cabinets and corpses. Amédée finally succeeds in pulling the
    huge body out a window, and drags it through the streets down to the Seine, but he is discovered by the police,
    and escapes by simply flying into the air. The ending is weak and somewhat obscure like all absurdist plays
    have.
    Amedee is a fantastic account of a man and a woman who live with a secret in the next room. Thirteen
    years ago the husband killed a man in a crime of passion and put him in the bedroom. The sheer absurdity of the
    story is that the dead man has been growing ever since. Now the crisis is here. The man's beard is all over the
    floor, his arms are poking through windows, and his feet are coming through the door. Obviously the time has
    come to move him. There is one period in the operation during which the stage is all legs from left to right; truly
    an absurd affair.
    Eugene Ionesco defines the term absurd as "that which is devoid of purpose... Cut off from his religious
    and metaphysical roots. Man is lost and all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless". As a result Ionesco
    developed beliefs in direct opposition to those of his father, he became anti-government, anti-military, he
    questioned the existence of God and believed that women were often cruelly treated by men. An
    internationally renowned playwright and absurdist master, Ionesco profoundly altered the face of modern drama.
    He wrote more than twenty plays, as well as stories, memoirs, and theoretical essays which prove man’s life
    is absurd and meaningless.
    In Amedee, the dramatist does not resolve the problem of man’s meaningless existence quite as
    positively as Camus. In fact, they typically offered no solution to the problem whatsoever, thus suggesting that
    the question is ultimately unanswerable. Briefly we can say that the basic theme, ridiculous characters, the
    depiction of a meaningless world, the isolated individuals, lack of plot or a clear beginning and end, man’s sheer
    inability to connect with the world {lack of communication} and disjointed language make Amedee a perfect
    ABSURDIST DRAMA followed by Pinter and Beckett in their works.

    {English Department, GGC Samundri 23/3/24 4:00 am}

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