Julian Guassardo’s “The Perils of Youth; or, the Gall of the House of Sud”

What has happened to absurdist theatre? Eugene Ionesco’s wheedling play, The Chairs (1952), was a post-war rebuff to the illusions of authority and statehood that lingered manically in the post-war context. The care in which the architecture of the stage is stubbornly maintained becomes an endless source of ribald comedy, as an Old Man and an Old Woman farcically argue into the aether. In the opening scene, stage directions tell us that “a bell clangs”; the Old Man declares, “excuse me, I must open the door”. The Old Man returns from a ghostly absence to declaim that, “he wanted to put me in a rage”. Throughout the play, the Old Man and Old Woman are bedevilled by mysterious phantoms, for whom they endlessly reassemble the furniture, all of which serve only to ossify their solitude. In equal terms, in Edward Albee’s haunting Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), a young couple’s sudden entry into a couple’s fiction-addled loneliness incites our knowledge of the fundamental loneliness of the silly securities we create in our home lives.

This is not even to mention Samuel Beckett, whose lesser-known work dispenses completely with narrative furniture in order to render the simple and solitudinous acts of speaking that are the hallmark of our species. If there is meaning in Not I, we are invited to scour for it ourselves, to resuscitate ideology, dialogue, and geopolitics from a tissue of half-disembodied speech. “… and all the time this ray or beam… like moonbeam… but probably not… certainly not… always the same spot” could be the transfiguration, or a fragmentary passage of Arthur Rimbaud or Stephane Mallarmé, or, nothing. You decide. This new, apparently pointless, dramaturgical pseudo-nihilism had caused a controversy in London, with Orson Welles and eminent theatre critics straining to have their say on whether or not a ludicrously pointless work like Ionesco’s The Chairs should be permitted in London. Ionesco used this controversy as a springboard to theorisation, declaring, “Une oeuvre d’art est l’expression d’une réalité incommunicable que l’on essaie de communiquer – et qui, parfois, peut être communiquée. C’est là son paradoxe – et sa vérité.” (“a work of art is the expression of an incommunicable reality that one is trying to communicate, and which, sometimes, can be communicated. Therein lies its paradox, as well as its truth”.) But this creed, allowing the audience to be meaning-makers, has been lost to a more conventional British empirical theatre that allows a more easy universe of heroes and villains, of the blossoming of egos.

Absurdist theatre would allow us a perfect pivot into understanding the bizarre contradictions of twenty-first century “society”. And so, Julian Guassardo’s upcoming play, The Perils of Youth, is vintage absurdist theatre, supplying this need. In depicting the agonistic, void-swirling struggle between mother and son, Guassardo is referencing the way in which the early absurdist pioneers teased meaning. Death, or God, or Eros, is perenially knocking at the door, teasing us to understand the mythic resonances of this struggle. The Son’s pretentious to artistry are lost within this expanded time; the Son “hear[s] the voices of the muses”. But such “muses” are left to ring hollow in a play that depicts the raw struggle for existence, stripping away layers of personage in struggling for this end. Scripture is truncated and ruptured; at one point, the Mother declares, “Many are called”. Without the second half of the sentence, “and few are chosen”, it appears that we have the noise of God without the jewel of silence hidden within the noise.

To this end, the play is written in a rather archaic style, as if performed in a different theatrical context, a Pinter play to be performed by the fireside. This is a bit of stylistic strangeness, but I would defend it on the grounds that it makes the play’s exploration of raw horror and essence more palpable. It remains to be seen how the play will grow in performance, and whether or not neo-absurdist theatre will be fitting for a time in which tech bros dominate the earth. One suspects it will be.