Martin Esslin

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Esslin arrived in England in 1938 with almost nothing, having fled Vienna after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Within a few decades, that same man would coin a phrase that reshaped how theatre scholars talked about the stage. The term was "theatre of the absurd," and the book that introduced it in 1961 would later be called "the most influential theatrical text of the 1960s." How did a Hungarian-born refugee become the person who named an entire movement? And why did so many of the playwrights he celebrated refuse to accept the label he gave them?

• 2. A Life in Motion

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  Pereszlényi Gyula Márton was born in Budapest on the 6th of June 1918. His family moved to Vienna when he was young, and it was there that his intellectual formation took shape. He studied Philosophy and English at the University of Vienna, then went further, studying directing under Max Reinhardt at the Reinhardt Seminar of Dramatic Arts. His classmate at the Seminar was the actor Milo Sperber. Though of Jewish descent, Esslin did not practice Judaism. When the Anschluss came in 1938, that distinction offered no protection. He left Austria, spent a year in Brussels, and then made his way to England, where he would spend the rest of his working life. He joined the BBC in 1940, beginning a career that would run through the full midcentury theatre revolution.

• 3. Naming the Unnamed

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  In 1961, Esslin published The Theatre of the Absurd, and in it he offered a precise definition of what he was describing. The movement, in his words, "strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought." The writers he grouped under this heading included Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco. Not all of them were pleased. Ionesco stated plainly that he did not like labels. The scholar Ahmad Kamyabi Mask went further, criticizing Esslin for a purported "colonialist" quality embedded in the term itself, applied as it was to Avant-garde theater from multiple cultures. Despite that resistance, the book shaped how later playwrights understood the tradition they were inheriting.

• 4. The BBC Years

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  Esslin spent more than three decades inside the BBC, beginning as a producer, script writer, and broadcaster in 1940. He worked for the external European Service before eventually being given charge of BBC Radio Drama, a post he held from 1963 to 1977. In that role he pursued a specific ambition: to build what he called a "national theatre of the air." His team translated a large number of foreign-language works into English during this period, extending the reach of European drama to British audiences. Between 1967 and 1990 he personally adapted and translated many plays by the Austrian playwright Wolfgang Bauer from the original German. The radio drama department under his leadership became one of the primary channels through which postwar European theatre entered the English-speaking world.

• 5. Scholar and Dramaturg

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  After leaving the BBC, Esslin moved into academic life, holding senior posts at Florida State University from 1969 to 1976 and at Stanford University from 1977 to 1988. In 1977 he also joined the Magic Theatre as its first resident dramaturg in American theatre, a role that did not exist in American new playhouses before him. His output as a writer was substantial. Works published under his name included The Theatre of the Absurd in 1962, Absurd Drama in 1965, Brecht: A Choice of Evils in 1959, The Anatomy of Drama in 1976, The Peopled Wound: The Work of Harold Pinter in 1970, Artaud in 1976, The Age of Television in 1981, and The Field of Drama in 1987, alongside numerous essays, articles, and reviews. He had married Renate Gerstenberg in 1947, and they worked together on many translations; some she completed herself, but they were published under his name because that improved their commercial prospects. Their daughter was named Monica.

• 6. Legacy

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  Esslin died in London on the 24th of February 2002 at the age of 83, after suffering from Parkinson's disease. He had received an OBE, the honor appended to the name Martin Julius Esslin OBE by which he is formally recorded. Keble College, Oxford, holds a special collection of more than 3,000 of his personal items, covering his own works and books by other prominent dramatists. The student drama society at Keble is named after him. The role he created at the Magic Theatre in 1977 as the first resident dramaturg in American theatre has since become standard at new playhouses across the country.