Последние издания книг Мартина Юлиуса Эсслина

The influence of Antonin Artaud on the contemporary theatre has only become evident since the early Sixties, although writers and directors have been directly or indirectly influenced by his thinking and innovations for many years. Today his pre-eminence as a founder of modern theatrical style is rivalled only by Brecht, with whom he has much in common.
The man and his work, as Martin Esslin persuasively argues in this perceptive study, are inseparable and must be considered together. Genius or madman, everything about Artaud is fascinating – his extraordinary life, his passions, his wide-ranging interests, the brilliance and originality that he brought to his plays, his productions and his other writings. Artaud died in 1948 at the age of fifty-two, but accomplished a revolution in his short life that is still bearing fruit today.
This compact, carefully researched study is an invaluable guide, combining readability with a sympathetic and authoritative study of its subject.

Уже в конце 1950-х выражение "театр абсурда" превратилось в броское клише. Об этом Мартин Эсслин пишет на первой странице своей книги о новых путях театра. Этот фундаментальный труд, вышедший полвека назад и дополненный в последующих изданиях, актуален и сегодня. Театр абсурда противостоит некоммуникативному миру, в котором человек, оторван от традиционных…

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…

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.

The plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, and a number of other avant-garde writers in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the United States mark a new development in the contemporary theatre. Beacuse its basic premise is the ultimate absurdity of the human condition, Martin Esslin has called it the Theatre of the Absurd. In this book he analyzes the work of its major exponents and traces its antecedents—the mimus of antiquity, the Commedia dell'Arte, the French Harlequinade, the English music hall, American vaudeville, the expressionist and surrealist drama of the early twentieth century, the Keystone Kops, dadaism, Brecht's epic theatre, and the Marx Brothers movies. At the same time he shows how it reflects the changes in science, psychology, and philosophy that have been taking place in the last fifty years. A student of the theatre in both Europe and America, Mr. Esslin has based his interpretation on productions of the plays in different countries and on personal interviews with many of the dramatists. The Theatre of the Absurd, he concludes, mirrors the present situation of Western man and will leave a permanent imprint on the history of drama.