Hamm: We're not beginning … to … to … mean something?Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something?(from 'Endgame' by Samuel Beckett)Martin Esslin coined the phrase 'Theatre of the Absurd' in this ground-breaking book, and the term has become part of the language just as this book has become an indispensable part of any literature and drama library: the definitive study of the playwrights who have dramatised the fundamental absurdity of the human condition. In this readable and illuminating work - still a classic of theatre studies - Esslin shows how Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter and others have confronted a world in which there is no communication and where man flounders in a void, cut off from his roots and shorn of all certainties."A seminal work" (Independent)"An exciting and stimulating book, a very useful reference work and a standard textbook" (Literary Review)