Martin Esslin came to the San Francisco area while he was teaching at Stanford and my first meeting with him was arrnged by KQED where I was assisting in developing their radio station. He was by then already settled in the Bay Area as a dramaturge for the Magic theatre in San Francisco. His voice was not always a popular one for the theatre community. I remember his pointing out that traditional theatre in San Francisco suffered for want of exposure to the more experienced professional theatre in New York, London, and around the world. This in contrast to local San Francisco experimental theatres, who create new, often avant-garde, experimental work (Esslin had produced all the radio plays of Beckett while he was Head of BBC Radio). But all this was a long time ago and Esslin's views on theatre in San Francisco are likely to have changed.

The remarks below by Jerome Crabb give a further glimpse of Esslin’s insight about contemporary theatre.  For us at KPFA, his contribution to our little facilities and experiments with radio drama was generous.  We had the opportunity to do many radio interviews with him and talks about new theatre and radio drama here and around the world.  Along the way he chose an original script, The Story, by SF writer, Carol Lashoff and directed it himself for our Radio Arts Project.  It got enthusiastic response from everyone, particularly our women listeners. Lashoff imagined the true story about how Eve gave birth to Adam and how Adam tried to keep the world from knowing the details.

I visited Martin once at his home in Winchelsea. He had waited for me to arrive by train at Rye, but I was thinking Winchelsea, the next stop, and waited there at the little wayward train depot for Martin to show up, before phoning, then hiking up the hill to meet him where he lived. Lost an hour, but there were many times ahead with this remarkably brilliant writer.

 

MARTIN ESSLIN (1918-2002) 

The following article is by Jerome P. Crabb originally published on web site October 7, 2006.

Theatre critic and scholar Martin Esslin was born in Budapest, Hungary on June 6, 1918. He moved to Vienna with his family at a young age and grew up there, eventually majoring in English and philosophy at the University of Vienna. He studied directing at the Reinhardt Seminar of Dramatic Arts, but in 1938, just as he was about to embark upon his theatrical career, the Nazi occupation of Austria forced him to flee the country. He spent a year in Brussels before moving to England, where he became a scriptwriter and producer for the BBC. Esslin was eventually promoted to head of radio drama, and during the 1960s he set out to bring his dream of a “national theater of the air” to life. During this period, the BBC produced hundreds of radio plays, many of them by foreign writers whom Esslin and his team translated into English for the first time.
In spite of this significant contribution to modern drama, however, Esslin is best known for his book The Theatre of the Absurd (1962), which coined the phrase that would come to define the work of such playwrights as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter. In an introduction to Absurd Drama (1965) Esslin wrote, “The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.”