35 Theatre of the Absurd is a term coined by Martin Esslin through in
1961, The Theatre of the Absurd. This term is intended to categorize the number of plays by Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Albee, and etc which
generally contain the absurdity.
2.2 Ingredients of the Drama
According to G.B Tennyson in his book An Introduction to Drama 1967:9, the way of approaching the drama is to examine the component parts of
the play. As quoted by Tennyson, Aristotle cites six elements as essential to a play: plot, thought, character, diction, music, and spectacle. Plot generally is a
narrative of motivated involved some conflicts which are finally resolved. Kasim, 2005: 28 Thought may refer to the ideas of the story or the theme. Characters
refer to the actors who act the play. Characterization is the author’s way of describing his characters in a literary work; or it is the author’s means of
differentiating one character to another. Kasim, 2005:34 while diction in this context may refer to the dialogues or the script of the drama itself. Then, as
claimed Tennyson, nowadays music is no longer considered as indispensable elements in a play. But in a broad sense, music can stand for rhythm and harmony,
the features we still seek in the drama. The other ingredients are equally necessary both diction and spectacle. By diction, we would understand language in general
and by spectacle, we would understand drama as the area of staging, scenery, costumes, properties and sound effects.
The important thing about the ingredients of a play, claimed Tennyson, is that the elements must be presented in the proper amounts. All the elements must
cohere and they must be directed to a single purpose is that “the whole action of
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36 the play.” The variety that joins to make a unity is the most distinctive feature of a
play. The various elements of a play within the same time make that play as a literary, a performing, a visual, an auditory, and a temporal art because many of
the indispensable elements do not exist on paper but only in a production of the play.
According to Tennyson, when we think of the term drama as meaning the whole area of theatrical art, seemingly, we have overemphasized the importance
of the play as a document. Perhaps, this not the intention, however, for drama in its broadest sense is not only the play, but also the performance of it in a theatre.
Thus, while action and imitation has been directed primarily toward clarifying the nature of the play and the playwright, the drama includes also the playhouse and
the player. The action of the playwright’s script has imitated, meaningfully by actors performing in a theatre. An adequately historical approach to the drama
would pay as much attention to the changes in acting technique and in the structure of the playhouses as it does to shifts in taste and styles of writing. As
often as not, changes in the acting technique and in the structure of the playhouses are substantially conditioned by the variations in acting technique and in
architecture. Then, Tennyson states that it is possible to develop an understanding of the drama from the study of plays themselves, however, the students or the
reader should not lose sight of the intimate connection that always exists between the play and the playhouse or between the playwright and the performers, since all
these comprise the nature of the drama. Furthermore, as stated by Tennyson, the more we consider the nature of
the drama, the more varied and complex it seems to become. If we keep the
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37 central element of action in mind, however, it can be seen that the other
ingredients—the play, the playwright, the theatre, and the actors—all come necessity. They are the means of realizing the action being imitated. Since, the
drama requires so many different kinds of services for its realization; it is a cooperative art form and a great amalgam art form. Only opera vies with the
drama for first place as the art that uses the greatest variety of materials to reach its goal.
Variety of ingredients is both the strength and the weakness of drama. It is a weakness because of the difficulty, given so many hands, of producing a play
and it is strength because of the scope of the potentially rewarding aspects of the drama. Thus, there are literally scores of things that may please us in a play;
among others: the pleasure from groupings and placements of persons on the stage and the pleasure in the arrangement of color and pattern on the stage.
Tennyson, at last, emphasizes that the student or the reader must learn to thread his way skillfully among the many dimensions of a play in order to discuss
it fairly so that the reader would not be bothered by the variety. He also insists on the primacy of action in the drama so that the reader will try to apprehend the
totality of the play from its idea to its performance.
2.3 Theatre of the Absurd 2.3.1 Its Development
