Martin Esslin

“Martin Esslin's radio work discussed on the Diversity website”

“Memorial Resolution, Stanford University (2004)”

“Obituary in The Guardian (27 February 2002)”

“In an age of increasing specialisation, he had a refreshing breadth of vision, while his penetrating mind could quickly comprehend when something new and important was happening in the arts. He could explain the complex in a straightforward and lucid manner, and his judgments were invaluable. His book The Theatre Of The Absurd was the most influential theatrical text of the 1960s.”

“The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart — the difference between theory and experience.”