"Deaths and Entrances". Burton Taylor Studio

When the world goes mad, the Absurdist is full of business.

Camus, Ionesco, Beckett et al discovered their nonsensical métier as Europe awoke, stunned, from the ravages of the Second World War. Two confused men wandering through a blasted wilderness was an image, back then, that people could relate to from their own experiences of bombed wastelands and aimless refugees. Millions were like Estragon and Vladimir from Waiting for Godot, dressed in rags, clinging to half-remembered vestiges of high culture, wondering where to go.

You can’t find meaning in a chaotic and indifferent universe. The Absurdists, rather than going on a fruitless hunt for a higher purpose, embraced the futility of existence and turned it into a kind of freedom, unshackled from any traditional idea of normality.

I wonder what it says about the world of 2026 that Absurdism is back and thriving on the Oxford stage.

Already this term we’ve had Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons and You Got Me, both of which featured two people adrift in a pitiless and incomprehensible limbo. Godot itself was due to put in an appearance from Seabass Productions, but has been saved till a later date. And now we have a newly written piece from Nathan Harris, which is not just flavoured with Beckett: it’s drenched in it.

Two tramps: check

Non-sequiturs: check

Battered bowler hat: check

Lost wilderness: check

Deliberately aimless wordplay: check

Another character coming in and leaving without explanation: check

It’s all there. But here’s the question: if Absurdism challenges ‘normality’, what does imitation Absurdism do? Does it reflect on reality, or on the source of its own inspiration? Is this a play about the madness of the world we live in, or about the genre of Absurdism itself? Is it Art? Or is it Fan Art?

Certainly Deaths and Entrances starts out as little more than parody. This could almost be a deleted scenes DVD extra from Samuel Beckett’s Greatest Hits, as Alf (Libby Shirnia) and Rube (Harrell Maguru) repeatedly ask each other, backs to the audience, ‘Do you think things are getting worse?’ It’s hypnotic, poetic (and, to be honest, ever so slightly soporific). There’s something reassuringly old-fashioned about a determined, anti-entertaining piece of theatre. It’s like the sort of committed art that used to happen in tiny venues in the 1960s, with experimental actors expounding to a highbrow, appreciative audience of seven people.

But gradually, something germinates from the receding tide of Absurdism. And what emerges is the title of the show. Deaths and Entrances is a collection of poems by Dylan Thomas, published just after World War Two. The book itself lies, insouciant as a pebble in a desert, on the stage floor. Inspired by the horrors and carnage of the recent past, it contains some of Thomas’s most powerful verse: intense, surreal and nightmarish. I’ve never thought of Dylan Thomas as an Absurdist, but there’s something in his hopeless search for redemption that links him to Beckett. Listen to these lines from that collection:

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

And so, the Beckettian rambling of Alf and Rube is alternated, in this play, with poetic sequences describing the experiences of two boys caught up in a rising wave of extremism and violence. The ‘ones in black’ figure more and more prominently, and the repeating line ‘Blood would mix with grass would mix with riverwater’ becomes a mantra of lost innocence.

The language is beautiful and uncompromisingly obscure. The performances are poised and expressive. And the final speech, which is simply a reading of Thomas’s Poem in October, completes this long play’s journey into night. What starts as a love-letter to Absurd Theatre ends as a poetic meditation on the human cost of war.