Theatre of the absurd humour often relies on a sense of hopelessness and violence. assignment

Their situation is obscure and Vladimir and Estragon spend the day (representative of their lives) waiting for the mysterious Godot, interacting with each other with quick and short speech. Although Beckett’s characters seem to expect so little from life, their minimal expectations are frustrated. We laugh at the characters because the scenes are humorous, yet it is human unhappiness that we are actually laughing at. Beckett creates this humour in such a way that there is no discernible purpose behind it.

Most of the time, the audience tends to laugh at the helplessness created by Vladimir and Estragon and the play can be seen as very humorous at times. Primarily, the tramps appear on stage, immediately Estragon is struggling to take off his boot, and this straight away is quite a comical issue, how he exhausts himself endlessly with little result, and then tries again and again. From this beginning, the audience would recognise Estragon in an amusing way, but would also see how pathetic he is in that he can’t even take his boot off, an extremely simple task.

The play has an attitude of questioning and challenging beliefs regarding religion, reality, theatre and the human condition which are traditional aspects of absurdist theatre. Attempts for realism are completely abandoned. The theatre world and the critical world are so intertwined that they cannot be separated. As an audience, we can’t work out ‘ what’s real and what’s not’. The line between actors and real characters is frequently blurred. The relative nature of truth and the fluid nature of identity are resonate heavily in ‘ The Real Inspector Hound’, especially that of questioning identity.

The structure of the play reflects these values. Meaningless and mistaken dialogue highlights the general chaos and ‘ meaninglessness’ of the entire situation (a common central-concept of absurdist plays). It is also circuitous in structure. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound is a very postmodernist play with no fixed time. The Real Inspector Hound consists of a mix of two situations that take place at the same time. First there is the actual play, a whodunnit, which has six main characters: Cynthia, Felicity, Simon, Mrs.