Tavoli dell’assurdo – Daniela Mauri e Eleonora Sparvoli – Stratagemmi 31

Absurdist Tables. Pt. I: Ionesco. Pt. II: Beckett

In her investigation of Ionesco’s La Cantatrice Chauve, Daniela Mauri focuses on the fake dialogue between Mr and Mrs Smith who discuss – with the only voice of Mrs Smith – what they have had for dinner. Food thus articulates the aesthetics of the Absurd, in which all coherence is gone. For, after swallowing the initial profusion of details on the menu, the audience discovers that the characters have

actually not eaten anything.

Moving in another area of the constellation of the Absurd and exploring Waiting for Godot and Endgame

in the key of appetite, Eleonora Sparvoli shows that food in Beckett has relinquished its nutritional  function; having lost also the conviviality once attached to it, food is chopped down and defused to become one of the senseless pieces in the mechanical montage which gives shape to the characters of the plays. After the end has swept away almost everything, food brings no help whatsoever to these survivors whose residual existence is founded on meaningless and ritualized repetitions.