What is it with theatre’s incessant need to produce absurdist plays? Isn’t it all a bit absurd?

Right now, the quite brilliant Gary Oldman is set to appear in York in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, a meandering non-sensical story of a man who listens to old recordings of himself. Meanwhile, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is stomping around London’s West End (again), also laughing in the face of theatrical convention in that it contains few laughs, haphazard scenes and character grotesques. And Glasgow’s Tron Theatre is set to stage East Belfast-based absurdist play Fleg, in which a central character imagines the Union flag to be an object of sexual desire.

Glasgow often plays home to the absurdist. Former Tron Theatre Artistic Director Andy Arnold delighted in Enda Walsh’s play Ballyturk, in which the opening scene featured a near naked man covered in flour leaping out of a wardrobe – and then dad dances to a T-Rex song. Why? We never found out. Nor were we supposed to.

At the same theatre, Martin McCormick’s Ma, Pa and the Little Voices featured Karen Dunbar as a heavily pregnant 80-year-old who lives with Pa, in a hi-rise flat in which ornaments are plastered to the wall. Why? We don’t know. Dunbar also appeared in the same theatre in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, playing a woman trapped in a pile of rising dirt that wasn’t a metaphor for the state of sketch comedy in Scotland, but a . . .

Enda Walsh’s play Ballyturk, in which the opening scene featured a near naked man covered in flour leaping out of a wardrobe (Image: free) Ah, but that’s the point of absurdist theatre. We aren’t supposed to understand it. Absurdism is “a philosophy that explores the inherent meaninglessness of existence and the human search for meaning in a meaningless world.”

When Beckett’s........

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