Eugène Ionesco

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Eugène Ionesco, 1959. (credit: Mark Gerson)

(born Nov. 26, 1909, Slatina, Rom. — died March 28, 1994, Paris, France) Romanian-born French playwright. He studied in Bucharest and Paris, where he lived from 1945. His first one-act "antiplay," The Bald Soprano (1950), inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd. He followed it with other one-act plays in which illogical events create an atmosphere both comic and grotesque, including The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), and The New Tenant (1955). His most popular full-length play, Rhinoceros (1959), concerns a provincial French town in which all the citizens are metamorphosing into rhinoceroses. Other plays include Exit the King (1962) and A Stroll in the Air (1963). He was elected to the Académie Française in 1970.

For more information on Eugène Ionesco, visit Britannica.com.

Ionesco, Eugene (1912–94), playwright. The French‐Romanian playwright, an exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd, has been a favorite of Off‐Broadway companies and collegiate and regional theatres since the early 1950s. Among his better‐known works are The Lesson (1956), The Chairs (1958), and The Bald Soprano (1958). His only major commercial successes on Broadway were Rhinoceros (1961), although the remarkable performance of Zero Mostel was as much responsible for its popularity as was the excellence of the play, and a superb London production of The Chairs in 1998, which was a sellout during its limited engagement.

The popular plays of the Franco-Romanian author Eugène Ionesco (1912-1994) protested the dehumanizing effects of modern civilization and depicted the despair of the individual who vainly seeks meaning for his or her existence. He has been called the founder of the "Theater of the Absurd".

Eugène lonesco was born on November 26, 1912, in Slatina, Romania, to a French mother and a Romanian father. The following year the family moved to Paris, but soon after he was 12, they returned to Romania. He completed all of his secondary education there and specialized in French at the University of Bucharest. From 1936 to 1938 he taught French in a secondary school in Bucharest. Two years after his marriage in 1936 to Rodica Burileano, he received a grant from the French government to study in France and write a thesis on Sin and Death in French Poetry Since Baudelaire. During the war he worked as a proofreader for a Paris publishing house.

Ionesco became a playwright in a roundabout way. While learning English, he was struck by the emptiness of the clichéd language that kept appearing in his phrasebook, and decided to write a play using nonsensical sentences. The Bald Soprano (1948) was a comic parody of a play, an "antiplay" as he called it, portraying human life as automatism and language as a senseless fragmentation of sentences. Mr. and Mrs. Smith uttered cliches, while the couple visiting them, the Martins, spoke to each other as though they were strangers until they realized that they shared the same home and child. The dialogue amongst the four eventually disintegrates into meaningless sounds. The idea was that a new vision of reality might occur to audiences if habitual patterns of rational thought were overthrown and presented, not just with arguments about the irrationality (or absurdity) of human existence, but with demonstrations of it. The language theme continued in Ionesco's second play, The Lesson (1951), with a professor tutoring a female student in subjects ranging from the logical constructs of mathematics to the less rigorous rules of language. As the language tutoring progresses, the professor became increasingly agitated, and in the end stabbed his student during a discussion of the word "knife." Critics, never at a loss for words, found that the circular structure of these two plays suggested Ionesco's pessimism.

In later plays, Ionesco used multiplying objects as his metaphor for the absurdity of life. In The Chairs] (1952), an elderly couple served as hosts for an audience which would assemble to hear a speaker deliver a message that will save the world. The couple arranged seating for their never-to-arrive guests, and the stage became crowded with chairs. Convinced that their audience had arrived and was seated, the hosts killed themselves, leaving them to hear the speaker who turned out to be a mentally-impaired deaf-mute. In The Victims of Duty (1953), coffee cups multiplied, and in The New Tenant (1957), the protagonist's apartment became progressively filled with furniture. Critics saw the multiplying objects in these works as suggesting the alienation and loss of identity experienced by people in modern society. Ionesco once remarked that "It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind," and rather than "theater of the absurd," he preferred the phrase "theater of derision.

Later in the 1950's, Ionesco wrote several plays featuring a modern-day Everyman named Berenger (Ionesco's self-image). The most famous of these and the one that wrote his name large in English-speaking theater was Rhinoceros (1959). In this play, totalitarianism transformed everyone into a savage rhinoceros except Berenger, who thinks about joining them but in the end decided to fight them. The inspiration for the play was Ionesco's reaction to a friend having joined the Nazi party, but its significance was in its denunciation of mindless conformity to a mob mentality. In winning the Jerusalem Prize in 1973 for his entire oeuvre, Rhinoceros was singled out as "one of the great demonstrations against totalitarianism." Berenger also appeared in The Killer (1958), Exit the King (1962), and A Stroll in the Air (1963).

During the next 20 years Ionesco's predominant theme was the subject of death, in such plays as Hunger and Thirst (1964), in which the protagonist (Berenger again) tried to escape death as represented by his wife and child; in The Killing Game (1970) an epidemic has taken away the inhabitants of a village. According to one critic, for Ionesco death represented the threat of nothingness, the "quintessence of the Absurd."

Many of Ionesco's plays had a dream-like quality. People can be transformed into animals or change their identity; they walked in the air or continued to grow after death. Ionesco preferred a series of states of consciousness over traditional plots. These dream-like qualities became more prominent in later plays, such as L'Homme aux Valises (1975) and Journey Among the Dead (1980).

In all, Ionesco wrote 28 plays, some of which have been in constant performance since 1955. He also wrote several volumes of essays, criticism, a novel [the Hermit (1972), made into a film called La Vase, starring the author himself], and he created illustrations for some of his works as well. During the last 10 years of his life he devoted himself to painting and exhibiting his works.

In the beginning, many critics thought Ionesco's work was obscure, but his plays went on to earn international acclaim. He received many honors during his lifetime, and by 1970 had been elected to The Academy Francaise. It was characteristic of the French that Ionesco's death in 1994 was announced by France's Ministry of Culture, rather than by his wife of 58 years or their daughter.

Further Reading

For his personal memoir, see Eugène Ionesco, Present Past, Past Present (1997, trans. Helen R Lane). A short work in the Twanye's World Authors Series is Deborah B. Gaensbauer's Eugène Ionesco Revisited (1996). See also Nancy Lane, Understanding Eugène Ionesco (1994). An older full-length study of lonesco is Richard N. Coe, Eugène Ionesco (1961). A brief biography is available on-line through the Capital PC User Group, Inc. at http://cpcug.org/user/stefan/ionesco.html(July 1997).

Ionesco, Eugène (1912-94). Playwright and leading exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd. His original dramatic techniques redefined the boundaries of drama in the 1950s and had a profound influence on theatre world-wide.

The son of a Romanian father and a French mother, his early years were divided between La Chapelle-Anthenaise and Bucharest, where he lived between the ages of 13 and 26 before settling in Paris in 1938. The recurrent themes of his plays—nostalgia for a luminous childhood, an interest in the phenomenon of language and the relativity of received ideas, an aversion to ideology—seem to have been shaped by these experiences. Like Beckett, he came to the theatre late, and his first writing for the stage met with indifference or hostility. His early works played to thin audiences in small Left-Bank theatres, but by 1953 they were attracting the attention of figures such as Queneau and Anouilh. In Britain, his work gave rise to a celebrated polemic involving Orson Welles, Lindsay Anderson, George Devine, and Philip Toynbee. Conducted in the Observer in 1958, it was led by Kenneth Tynan, who attacked Ionesco for his lack of social or political purpose. His reply—that a playwright simply writes plays—helped to define him as a writer concerned only to communicate his personal anguish rather than to engage in ideological debate. In the 1960s his plays were taken up by Barrault and Orson Welles. His entry to the repertoire of the Comédie-Française in 1966, and election to the Académie Française in 1970, completed his canonization as a modern classic.

His earliest and most innovative works were one-act nonsense plays: La Cantatrice chauve (produced 1950), La Leçon (1951), Les Chaises (1952), and Jacques ou la Soumission (1955). These absurdist sketches, to which he applies epithets such as ‘anti-pièce’, ‘pseudo-drame’, and ‘farce tragique’, express the modern sense of non-communication and alienation, but with a surreal comic force. As well as castigating bourgeois conformism, they parody conventional theatrical forms. Disregarding psychology and coherent dialogue, they depict a dehumanized world with mechanical, puppet-like characters mouthing platitudes and non sequiturs. The plays have no story-line, but deploy a simple and effective dramatic structure based on an accelerating rhythm. Language becomes increasingly reified, words and material objects acquire a life of their own, the stage is steadily invaded by objects and cacophony, overwhelming the characters and creating a growing sense of menace.

With his second full-length play, Tueur sans gages (1959; the first was Amédée, ou Comment s'en débarrasser, 1954), he began to explore more sustained dramatic situations. This play also marks the appearance of more humanized characters, notably a central character called Bérenger. A comically naïve individual who engages the spectator's sympathy, Bérenger is an autobiographical figure who projects the author's sense of wonderment and anguish in the face of the strangeness of reality. In Tueur sans gages, while visiting the Utopian ‘Cité radieuse’, Bérenger encounters the ineluctable face of death in the figure of a serial killer. In Rhinocéros (1960) he sees his friends transformed one by one into pachyderms, until he stands alone against the conformist tide. Inspired by the rise of the fascist Iron Guard in Romania in the 1930s, Rhinocéros expresses most forcibly the author's horror of ideological conformism, seen as a contagious mental mutation. Le Roi se meurt (1962) shows le roi Bérenger I^er, an allegorical Everyman, struggling to come to terms with the inevitability of his own death. These hallucinatory plays are outstanding for the memorable theatrical metaphors—a motiveless killer, a disintegrating kingdom, weightlessness—with which ontological states are expressed.

Le Piéton de l'air (1963) marked the end of the Bérenger series. His later work, which has generally received less attention, includes La Soif et la faim (1966, premiered at the Comédie-Française); Jeux de massacre (1971), inspired by Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year; Macbett (1972), a free adaptation of Shakespeare; and Ce formidable bordel (1973).

Apart from an unproduced libretto for an opera, he did not write for the stage after Voyage chez les morts in 1981. But the legendary production of La Cantatrice chauve, which transferred to the 80-seater Théâtre de la Huchette in 1952, was still playing there in 1993.

[David Whitton]

Bibliography

• G. Tarrab, Ionesco à cœur ouvert (1970)
• R. Coe, Ionesco: A Study of his Plays (rev. edn., 1971)

Quotes:

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

"There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation."

"For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart."

"The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water."

"There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is."

"A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind."

See more famous quotes by Eugene Ionesco