2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

work produced explicitly as a product of the movement was not substantial enough for an discrete surrealist theatrical aesthetic to be developed.

As a result there exists only a handful of relevant theatrical works from the time period to consider. Some critics attribute this scarcity to an incompatibility between Surrealism and the theatre, arguing that a Surrealist theatre would necessarily lack the conventions of traditional narrative theatre which characterise an effective work: characters of Surrealist literature are fragmentary, setting in time and place is vague, and narrative is disjointed. Many critics consider the fundamental dramatic flaws of a conceptual ‘pure’ Surrealist Theatre as the reason for why it never emerged in prominence (Rapti, 2013), Views such as this one are nowadays less frequently professed, especially considering the work and success of such playwrights as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Arthur Adamov, who were able to create extremely fascinating and engaging theatre with an enduring legacy The work of these writers and the success of Theatre of the Absurd as a whole succeeded in creating theatre with a surrealist ethos, and provides evidence that Artaud’s vision of a pure theatre based in the imagery of the subconscious was feasible and can possess a great deal of artistic power. Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” was written through an automatic process, wherein Beckett tried to supress the influence of his conscious thought not only by writing automatically in his second language French (Esslin, 1991). The Theatre of The Absurd without a doubt became the spiritual and artistic successor of Surrealism in the theatre, but it in its time, it remains the case that Surrealism met the Theatre, and as a result it is difficult to analyse.

The work of Roger Vitrac and Antonin Artaud in the Alfred Jarry Theatre is probably the closest anyone at the time came to working with the tenets of conventional Surrealism in the

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