This is the Theatre of the Absurd Learning Lab. It is a hands-on way to find out why the strangest plays of the twentieth century are so carefully built. It is a puzzle in its own right: what pattern lies behind the nonsense?
Two men wait by a tree. A man pushes a boulder up a hill. A rhinoceros walks through a town square wearing a human face. It is not much of a plot, yet people have argued about these plays for seventy years.
How to Use The App
Pick any menu item from the left sidebar. There is no required order. Each module has four parts:
When you finish a module, tick the box beside it, and your device will remember it.
What You Will Learn and Do
The Theatre of the Absurd Learning Lab starts in 1945. Europe is in ruins, many people’s faith in progress and reason has been badly shaken, and a handful of writers in Paris respond by making plays that look nothing like the ones that came before them. You will meet the thinkers behind the mood, including the existentialists, and the four playwrights usually grouped together: Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov and Genet. By the end of the first stretch, you will be able to tell them apart, and to explain why “Theatre of the Absurd” is a critic’s label and not a club anyone joined.
From there, the app takes the plays apart to show how they are built. You will explore how repetition and circular endings wear meaning down, what happens when cause and effect quietly stop working, and which stage conventions a playwright can break before an audience stops following. None of it is left as theory. Each idea comes with something to sort, rank, label, or arrange, so you find the pattern for yourself and then check your thinking against the explanation.
Next comes the performer’s perspective. You will watch ordinary conversation break down, stage by stage, into cliché, echo, slipped words, fragments, and silence. You will test how long a pause can last before it becomes unbearable, and how comedy and dread can share the same moment. You will also find out why waiting is never “doing nothing” on stage, and how a performer fills an empty wait with real choices and real changes of intention.
The final stretch in the app turns to design and the inner life of the plays. You will work out how little a stage needs before it stops being a place and starts being an idea, build a mood from a few carefully chosen images, and look at how dreams and nightmares shape the look of the work. Along the way, a glossary of key terms is always one hover away.
Every module ends with a Rehearsal Room: practical tasks you can try out in the classroom, with a core version, a challenge and a senior extension activity. Teachers will find timing and grouping notes for each activity. There is no login and no required order, so you can wander, and the tick-box beside each module keeps track of where you have been.
Catch the Falling Things
Keep an eye on the app screen. Now and then, something faint drifts down the page: a bowler hat, a wall clock, a wooden chair, a bare tree, a parasol, a dustbin, a rhinoceros with a human face, or a sand mound with a very happy woman popping out of it. None of these objects are random; each one is a nod to a famous play.
Can you name them all? Here is a hint, and it is a spoiler if you want to work them out yourself:
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