English Literature / Unit 17 ENL 1639 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Absurd or Realist? Reading Postwar Drama
The idea
Postwar British drama divides into two modes, and questions often ask which a play belongs to. Realist drama, such as Osborne's Look Back in Anger, presents recognizable people in a specific social setting, a cramped flat, and attacks class and convention directly; its anger is explained by circumstance. Absurdist drama, such as Beckett's Waiting for Godot, strips away plot, setting and logic to show a purposeless condition; characters wait, repeat and talk past each other. Pinter sits between them: realistic rooms and speech, but unexplained menace and pauses. Stoppard plays absurd games with Hamlet. To decide, ask whether the play explains its characters' situation by society, which suggests realism, or leaves it unexplained and universal, which suggests the absurd.
In practice
Explained by society, or left unexplained.
Where people slip
A realistic setting does not make a play realist. Pinter's rooms are ordinary, but his menace is never explained.
Your place on the trail
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