Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher, is most worldly known for his views on nihilism. In one of his works, Will to Power, he writes, “Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world,” (Nietzsche 14). In Nietzsche’s perspective, he believes that there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we are able to give it. When it comes to theatre of the absurd, many playwrights and authors use nihilism, more specifically existential nihilism, to help the audience discreetly understand how in the end our choices don’t matter because we will all die no matter what, so to dramatize such human factors like death is meaningless, because we live in a purposeless world. Looking at the film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, director and writer Tom Stoppard creates a comedically dire situation around the title characters to explore the weight of free will, to question what life is and why it matters.
The British Library explains how the theatre of the absurd was originally a response to the destruction and anxieties of the 20th century from the aftermath of WWII, and that response was to question the nature of what reality and illusion really are. Theatre of the absurd is characterized by a fascination with absurdity in all its forms; philosophical, dramaturgical, existential and so on, this is a drama form that pushes theatre to the extremes and asks the probing questions about what reality (and unreality) truly looks like. Absurd drama tends to subvert logic in a sense that it de-romanticizes the simplicity of what life really is like. It relishes in the unexpected and the logically impossible fascinations. Sigmund Freud explains that “there is a feeling of freedom we can enjoy when we are able to abandon the straitjacket of logic”. One of the most important aspects of an absurd drama is its distrust of language as a means of how we communicate with others. Language, some would say, has become nothing but a vehicle for conventionalized and meaningless exchanges that human beings have conformed to because society dictates how humans are able to interact with one another. By ridiculing the conventionalized and stereotyped speech patterns, theatre of the absurd tries to make people aware of the possibility of going beyond everyday thoughts and pushes people to communicate more authentically.
Both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could be considered the physical representations of society before and after the movement of the theatre of the absurd was introduced, in such that Rosencrantz always witnessed scientific phenomenons and he questions the probability of chance and free will. Guildenstern on the other hand, just seems to accept how things are and sees the scientific phenomenons as childish games that Rosencrantz tries to partake in. An example of this would be at the beginning of the movie, Rosencrantz picks up a coin and flips it more than 50 times and it always landed on heads. He tries to question the probability of the coin flipping on tails, while Guildenstern tried to blow off the experience as a coincidence. While a tossed coin should, according to the laws of probability, have a 50-50 chance of falling ‘heads’ or ‘tails,’ the coin in this play disrupts the norm, signaling that the law is suspended. Such suspension may seem at first to be the stuff of make-believe, but the movie quickly reveals that there is nothing fictional about such odds: they are in fact the odds of humans against impending death. Death will always prevail, no matter how badly humans will try to fight it, or struggle to stay alive. This furthers the question if there is such thing as free will or is a person’s fate sealed no matter the actions they take to try and defer from it. The fact is, it doesn’t matter how many mistakes one makes in their life because theatre of the absurd explains how people were meant to be where they end up, but also that doesn’t even matter because in the end, everyone goes through the same fate. Death is a natural event that has time and time again been a use of a dramatic Shakespearean play, which also romanticizes it, when in reality, death is the only constant fate that no being can ever run from, no matter how advanced humans will get.