Two suburban English couples exchange phrasebook platitudes by the fire, a maid announces that she is Sherlock Holmes, and language collapses into noise (1950)
The Bald Soprano — the 'anti-play' that grew out of an Assimil English primer.
Literature · Playwrights
Eugène Ionesco
1909–1994 · Romanian-French
Theatre of the Absurd
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian-French dramatist and, with Beckett, the central figure of what Martin Esslin named the Theatre of the Absurd. His plays begin in a banal sitting room or classroom and proceed by relentless logic into nonsense, proliferation and terror: chairs multiply, corpses grow, and a whole town turns into rhinoceroses. He was elected to the Académie française in 1970.
How to spot them
- ▸Cliché and language-primer English taken seriously until it disintegrates
- ▸Objects that multiply and fill the stage — chairs, furniture, mushrooms, eggs
- ▸The recurring everyman Bérenger, an ordinary man facing death or conformity
- ▸Romanian by birth, wrote in French; elected to the Académie française
- ▸His first play has been running non-stop at the same Paris theatre since 1957
Key works
An old couple on an island fill the stage with chairs for invisible guests, then jump out of the window leaving the message to a deaf and dumb orator (1952)
The Chairs.
A professor gives a private lesson in arithmetic and philology, grows steadily more excited, and murders his pupil — the fortieth that day (1951)
The Lesson.
The inhabitants of a French provincial town turn one by one into thick-skinned horned beasts, and only one shabby man refuses (1959)
Rhinoceros — a parable of the rise of fascism, staged in Paris by Jean-Louis Barrault in 1960.
A monarch is informed in the opening minutes that he will die at the end of the play, and takes the whole play to accept it (1962)
Exit the King (Le Roi se meurt).
A couple's flat is taken over by a corpse with ever-growing feet, while mushrooms sprout in the hall (1954)
Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It.
A shabby hero explores a gleaming radiant city, discovers a murderer at work in it, and cannot argue him out of anything in a long final monologue (1959)
The Killer (Tueur sans gages) — the first appearance of Bérenger.
Key ideas
- Language as the enemy: clichés repeated until they stop meaning anything
- Proliferation — the stage physically overwhelmed by multiplying objects
- 'Rhinocerisation': the ordinary person's slide into ideological conformity
- Death as the absurd fact that no philosophy makes bearable
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Slatina, Romania, on 26 November 1909 to a Romanian father and a French mother
- •The Bald Soprano premiered at the Théâtre des Noctambules in Paris on 11 May 1950
- •It was written out of the flat, absurd sentences in an Assimil English course book
- •The double bill of The Bald Soprano and The Lesson has played at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris since 18 February 1957 — over 19,500 performances, a world record for a continuous run in one theatre
- •Elected to the Académie française on 22 January 1970, to the seat left vacant by Jean Paulhan
- •Rhinoceros drew on his memories of friends joining the Romanian Iron Guard in the 1930s
- •He conducted a celebrated 1958 dispute with the critic Kenneth Tynan over whether theatre must be political
- •Martin Esslin coined the term 'Theatre of the Absurd' in 1961, placing Ionesco alongside Beckett
- •Died in Paris on 28 March 1994 and is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery
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Sources
- Théâtre de la Huchette — The Ionesco Show
- Eugène Ionesco — Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre