Background
Esslin, Martin Julius was born on June 8, 1918 in Budapest, Hungary.
(In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at ...)
In 1953, Samuel Beckett’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 proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ 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, Esslin’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 Beckett’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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400075238/?tag=2022091-20
( The 'Theatre of the Absurd' has become a familiar term ...)
The 'Theatre of the Absurd' has become a familiar term to describe a group of radical European playwrights - writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter - whose dark, funny and humane dramas wrestled profoundly with the meaningless absurdity of the human condition. It is a testament to the power and insight of Martin Esslin's landmark work, originally published in 1961, that its title should enter the English language in the way that it has. Now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series with a new preface by Marvin Carlson, The Theatre of the Absurd remains to this day a clear-eyed work of criticism on a compelling period of European writing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1472577027/?tag=2022091-20
(In 1958 The Birthday Party was dismissed by all but a few...)
In 1958 The Birthday Party was dismissed by all but a few critics and closed after one week's run in London. Since then Harold Pinter has come to be acknowledged as "our best living playwright" (Irving Wardle, The Times) Martin Esslin's study of Pinter's plays has become a standard work since its publication in 1970. This sixth, revised edition - published to mark Pinter's 70th birthday and updated to cover his most recent plays, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes and Celebration - offers a comprehensive survey of the whole span of Harold Pinter's writing career by one of the most distinguished commentators on modern theatre."It will certainly not be the last book on Pinter, but seems bound to remain one of the best" John Russell Taylor"Holds its place as the most straightforwardly useful account of Pinter's work to date" Times Literary Supplement
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0413668606/?tag=2022091-20
("A brilliantly perceptive study of the most ambiguous and...)
"A brilliantly perceptive study of the most ambiguous and perpetually fascinating figure of the twentieth century European theatre" (Kenneth Tynan) Brecht's influence on the theatre may well be as powerful as Kafka's influence on the novel and this study of Brecht's life and work was unanimously well received when first published just after the writer's death in 1959. This book portrays the paradox of a man whose work was admired on the Western side of the Iron Curtain despite ideological differences whilst in the East his artistic output was criticised but his communist ideas were welcomed. This authoritative text has stood the test of time
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0413547507/?tag=2022091-20
(A unique book of criticism that brings both theatre and f...)
A unique book of criticism that brings both theatre and film studies within a single theoretical framework Martin Esslin is the author of seminal critical studies such as The Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht: A Choice of Evils. Covering artists as diverse as Duchamp and Brecht, Busby Berkely and Congreve, Pinter and WC Fields, Esslin's approach is fresh and genuinely inquisitive, examining various prepared positions and testing the jargon. Taking each element of drama - the actor, the setting, the text, the music - and making provocative cross-references to stage and screen, Esslin offers a carefully argued "system" of his own, much fuller and more sensitive than anything that has gone before.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0413535304/?tag=2022091-20
critic director author drama educator
Esslin, Martin Julius was born on June 8, 1918 in Budapest, Hungary.
Diploma, Reinhardt Seminar of Dramatic Art, Vienna, 1938. D. Little (honorary), Kenyon College, 1978.
Scriptwriter, director British Broadcasting Corporation, London, 1940-1955, assistant head European productions department, 1955-1960, assistant head radio drama, 1960-1963, head drama, radio, 1963-1977. Professor drama Stanford University, California, since 1977. Literature advisory Royal Shakespeare Company, London, 1963-1972.
Chairman drama panel, Arts Council Great Britain, 1976. Dramaturg Magic Theatre, San Francisco, 1977.
("A brilliantly perceptive study of the most ambiguous and...)
( The 'Theatre of the Absurd' has become a familiar term ...)
(A unique book of criticism that brings both theatre and f...)
(In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at ...)
(In 1958 The Birthday Party was dismissed by all but a few...)
(The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Ess...)
(THEATRE OF THE ABSURD.)
Member of Garrick (London).
Son of Paul and Charlotte (Schiffer) Pereszlenyi. M. Renate Gerstenberg, September 13, 1947. 1 daughter, Monica.