JOHN WHITING:: THE AGONY OF THE ABSURD

This book is a complete and comprehensive projection of John Whiting as an absurdist playwright. It is a round and unvarnished story of a prodigious playwright who within a short span of his life, did much to outshine his contemporaries. His journey was not limited to stage and theatre. He also wrote for the films, television and even radio. The journey began with The Conditions of Agreement in 1946 and ended with The Devils in 1961. In between he wrote many landmark plays through which one can trace the evolutionary trajectory of a legend in the making who was a confluence of mind and mystery, love and revenge, sentimentality and blood lust. His plays are replete with sin and sleaze, callousness and collusion. This was because in Whiting, one also comes across the diminution of norms owning to ethical elasticity and dispensability of principles. In his plays the pathology of power is matched by the ethos of human failings as is exemplified by the rise and fall of Grandier in The Devils. Here the banality of power fails to keep distance between pretense and principles. Bereft of the romance of renewal and predictability, many of his plays end up on disjointed note in the best tradition of the theatre of the absurd. The playwright's obsession with pre-mediated violence creates a disconnect between storyline and characterization. In practically every plays of Whiting creates a heady cocktail of fear, violence, loathing and paranoia and yet they make for a compelling reading. This book is a summary of my findings regarding John Whiting with terse comments on his qualities as an absurdist playwright. It has been my endeavor to assess him both as a literary figure and a playwright, wedded to the absurdist tradition.