Martin Julius Esslin OBE (6 June 1918 – 24 February 2002) was a Hungarian-born English producer and playwright dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of that name (1961).
One interesting side note to the game is the presence of what may be the only absurdist character in a video game, Ougo the Strange.
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More than any other, Songs from the Second Floor succeeded in cementing his personal style – a style characterized by long takes, absurdist comedy, stiff caricaturing of Swedish culture and Felliniesque grotesque.
Inspired by the theatrical experiments in the early half of the century and by the horrors of the war, the avant-garde Parisian theatre, "New theatre" or, as the critic Martin Esslin termed it, "Theatre of the Absurd," around the writers Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal, refused simple explanations and abandoned traditional characters, plots and staging.
For example, in 1896, he reviewed the premiere of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi—a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd—and called it "a filthy fraud which deserves nothing but the silence of contempt."
Created by Daglow as a tribute to Theatre of the Absurd playwright Eugène Ionesco, Ougo is a bizarre Ionesco-style character in the otherwise normal island of Farr Windward who ends up playing a key role in one of the game's missions.