The Cagebirds And The Absurd

David Campton’s The Cagebirds is an allegorical one act play which explores the themes of oppression and human behaviour. The characters in the play, are as the title suggests, caged birds. However these birds reflect aspects of human behaviour and it is never clear whether they are actually birds or humans. Blah What is apparent though is that the characters, who I shall refer to as birds hereafter, are in an environment which is not natural to them. They are trapped by their oppressor, The Mistress, and have developed a kind of psychological instability which prevents them from understanding their oppression.

 

Albert Camus states:

A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, blah because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity (1942 cited by Esslin 1974, p. 5).

Camus’s description of The Absurd appears to mirror the situation in which the birds of The Cagebirds are in. They are in a cage, deprived of the outside world and unable to recall the past apart from pieces of information about which they have become obsessed. For example The Gossip relays parts of conversation which she has heard in the outside world ‘You won’t let it go any further? After all a confidence is a confidence’ (Campton 1976, p. 10). These random outbursts by the birds are the only memories which they have of the outside world and their obsession with them is absurd. They have been forced into exile by The Mistress and now experience this ‘divorce’ that Camus describes.

 

The Cagebirds is different from many other absurdist plays blah though, placed on a scale of absurdity it is most definitely at the lower end of the spectrum. There is much less of an experimental feel to The Cagebirds than there is to other plays of the category which is perhaps why Campton’s work has been referred to as comedy of menace, a title which was coined out of another of his works The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace. However, Absurdist plays each have a different approach to their form, and while The Cagebirds is on a less absurd level than the works of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, it is still absurd.

 

In Retold’s production of The Cagebirds, I wanted to focus on the the elements of absurdism within the behaviour of the birds. It was important for me that our production presented the absurdity of human behaviour in a way that our audience could relate to.

 

 

Works Cited:

Campton, David (1976) The Cagebirds: A Play, London: Samuel French

Esslin, Martin (1974) The Theatre of the Absurd, London: Eyre Methuen