Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu on November 26, 1909, was one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict in a tangible way the solitude of humans and the insignificance of one's existence.

Ionesco the author

The origins of his first play

Like Beckett, Ionesco came to the theatre late: he did not write his first play until 1948 (La Cantatrice Chauve, first performed in 1950 with the English title The Bald Soprano). At the age of 40 he decided to learn English using the Assimil method, conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to memorize them. Re-reading them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew, but which suddenly struck him as being as stupefying as they were indisputably true.

Related Topics:
Beckett - 1948 - La Cantatrice Chauve - The Bald Soprano - Assimil

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This feeling only intensified with the introduction in later lessons of the characters known as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith". To his astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, who was English like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, he thought, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. For Ionesco, the clichés and truisms of the conversation primer disintegrated into wild caricature and parody with language itself disintegrating into disjointed fragments of words.

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Ionesco set about translating this experience into a play, La Cantatrice Chauve, which was performed for the first time in 1950 under the direction of Nicolas Bataille. It was far from a success and went unnoticed until a few established writers and critics, among them Jean Anouilh and Raymond Queneau, championed the play.

Related Topics:
1950 - Nicolas Bataille - Jean Anouilh - Raymond Queneau

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Early works

Ionesco's earliest works, and his most innovative, were one-act nonsense plays: La Cantatrice chauve (1950), La Leçon (1951), Les Chaises (1952), and Jacques ou la Soumission (1955). These absurdist sketches, to which he gave such descriptions as "anti-play" (anti-pièce in French) express modern feelings of alienation and the impossibility and futility of communication with surreal comic force, parodying the conformism of the bourgeoisie and conventional theatrical forms. In them Ionesco rejects a conventional story-line as their basis, instead taking their dramatic structure from accelerating rhythms and/or cyclical repetitions. He disregards psychology and coherent dialogue, thereby depicting a dehumanized world with mechanical, puppet-like characters who speak in non-sequiturs. Language becomes rarefied, with words and material objects gaining a life of their own, increasingly overwhelming the characters and creating a sense of menace.

Related Topics:
La Cantatrice chauve - 1950 - La Leçon - 1951 - Les Chaises - 1952 - Jacques ou la Soumission - 1955 - Surreal - Non-sequitur

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The full-length plays

With Tueur sans gages (1959; his second full-length play, the first being Amédée, ou Comment s'en débarrasser in 1954), Ionesco began to explore more sustained dramatic situations featuring more humanized characters. Notably this includes Bérenger, a central character in a number of Ionesco's plays, the last of which is Le Piéton de l'air.

Related Topics:
Tueur sans gages - 1959 - 1954 - Le Piéton de l'air

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Bérenger is a semi-autobiographical figure expressing Ionesco's wonderment and anguish at the strangeness of reality. He is comically naïve, engaging the audience's sympathy. In Tueur sans gages he encounters death in the figure of a serial killer. In Rhinocéros he watches his friends turning into rhinoceroses one by one until he alone stands unchanged against this tide of conformism. It is in this play that Ionesco most forcefully expresses his horror of ideological conformism, inspired by the rise of the fascist Iron Guard in Romania in the 1930s. Le Roi se meurt (1962) shows him as King Bérenger 1st, an everyman figure who struggles to come to terms with his own death.

Related Topics:
Rhinocéros - Rhinoceros - Fascist - Iron Guard - Romania - 1962 - Everyman

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Later works

Ionesco's later work has generally received less attention. This includes La Soif et la faim (1966), Jeux de massacre (1971), Macbett (1972, a free adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth) and Ce formidable bordel (1973).

Related Topics:
1966 - 1971 - Macbett - 1972 - Shakespeare - Macbeth - 1973

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Apart from a libretto for an opera which was never produced, Ionesco did not write for the stage after Voyage chez les morts in 1981. However, La Cantatrice chauve was still playing at the Théâtre de la Huchette in 1993, having moved there in 1952.

Related Topics:
Libretto - Opera - 1981 - La Cantatrice chauve - 1993 - 1952

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Theoretical Writings

Like Shaw and Brecht, Ionesco also contributed to the theatre with his theoretical writings (Wellwarth, 33). Ionesco wrote mainly in attempts to correct critics who he felt misunderstood his work and therefore wrongly influenced his audience. In doing so, Ionesco articulated ways in which he thought contemporary theatre should be reformed (Wellwarth, 33). Notes and Counter Notes is a collection of Ionescos writings, including musings on why he chose to write for the theatre and direct responses to his contemporary critics.

Related Topics:
Shaw - Brecht

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In the first section, titled "Experience of the Theatre" Ionesco claimed to have hated going to the theatre as a child because it gave him "no pleasure or feeling of participation" (Ionesco, 15). He wrote that the problem with realistic theatre is that it is less interesting than theatre that invokes an "imaginative truth," which he found to be much more interesting and freeing than the "narrow" truth presented by strict realism (Ionesco, 15). He claimed that "drama that relies on simple effects is not necessarily drama simplified" (Ionesco, 28).

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