This chapter discusses the variety of modernist theatrical practices grouped under the rubric ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ by Martin Esslin in the 1960s and demonstrates that absurdist theatre was a much more politically attuned and transnational phenomenon than commonly acknowledged. Esslin’s original aim was to understand theatrical practices in France that were related to, but stood outside of, the boundaries and timelines of the symbolist and surrealist movements, in particular the work of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, and Jean Genet. The chapter sets French absurdist drama of the 1950s and 1960s in a wider historical context and calls for the better recognition of a global absurdist canon, tracing the blossoming of a new absurdist drama through playwrights including Virgilio Piñera (Cuba), Halide Edib (Turkey), Issam Mahfouz (Lebanon), Osvaldo Dragún (Argentina), Kobo Abe (Japan), Yusuf Idris and Tawfiq al-Hakim (Egypt), and through the contemporary legacies of Beckett’s absurdist model.