Cairo – “Gulf”

Arthur Adamov (1908-1970) took a big step towards realism, he no longer wrote plays in which the characters only reflected his psychological impulses and tendencies, but instead, these characters had to achieve their objective existence and live for themselves. The intended play here is “The Ping Pong Game” (translated into Arabic by Farooq Abdul Qadir), which has been described as “the greatest of Adamo’s books” and “a great and glorious work in the whole arena of the absurd”.

“The Ping Pong Game,” like Adamo’s first play, “The Trick,” revolves around the absurdity and futility of human endeavor, but the distinction between them is fundamental and important. Tantra ensures that no matter what you do, death awaits you. At the end of the road, you stop at this abstract problem, and Ping Pong gives it an explanation and explanation. In other words, the play adds to the fundamental problem raised by Adamo’s first plays, the answers to these questions: How does human effort dissipate, and why?

In that play, the elements of reality and fantasy come together in equal shares, and if the world in which the events take place is completely isolated from the world of reality, this is not because the writer lacks a sense of reality, but because we see. The interests of the characters confined within a narrow region of reality and the characters in the play have their own unique individual existence, they are not personalities who overcome psychological forces that they cannot resist or control, but they are free to determine their destiny.

Adamov was not only a playwright, but also a thinker. His name was associated with the theater of the absurd from the beginning, and until the early sixties he represented the basic trends of this intellectual and artistic movement with Beckett and UNESCO. About its circumstances and contradictions.

Dreamy environment

As Beckett came from Ireland and UNESCO from Romania, Adamov came from the Caucasus, but he knew Paris from his youth, his eyes were opened to French literature, he wrote poems of a surrealistic nature, but he gradually left writing. He did translations of Chekhov, Gogol, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, Buchner and Strindberg.

Later, when Adamov published his confessions, he revealed the secret of a deep spiritual and psychological crisis that prompted him to stop writing, and it created a model document for a case study, psychologists called it, in which Adamov explained his fears, illusions. , and visions inspired him to write plays that take place in suffocating horrors, and he formulated theoretical considerations to develop an aesthetic theory of the absurd, and the foundations from which he later departed from this theater. .

The first pages of Adamo’s Confessions begin with what can be considered a precursor to existential literature and the Theater of the Absurd, when he says: “First I know that I exist, but who am I? I know that I am in pain, and if I am in pain, it is because there is disillusionment and division within me, and I Deranged, it is true, but what am I parted from? I cannot know him, nor name him.

He says that he has a deep sense of alienation deep inside him and that he keeps explaining the symptoms of his mental illness, that he is fully aware of the reality of his illness and is interested in modern psychology. His main books are for Carl Jung, but he also knows the benefits of this mental illness, because it gives the sufferer a kind of sharp and brilliant insight and knowledge of the depths of the soul that the ordinary person does not.

After the events of May 1968 in France and the return to power of General de Gaulle, he took great strides towards the left, he became a spokesman for the determined political playwrights in France, and Adamov began writing at the end of the Second World War. To the theater.

Adamov stayed in Paris until his death in 1970. He is a writer and thinker with a long history of absurd drama. He gives us a rare example of a writer who chose a path of salvation that was hard and difficult. Introspection, and after he surrendered to his visions, dreams and nightmares, he was able to conquer them, control them, and then become a transparent object, the artist must always reveal what is inside him.