The events between 1914 and 1945 produced considerable pessimism and cynicism in the writers and artists of much of the world. During those 31 years, Europe was torn apart not by one war but two, the first of which featured trench warfare, leading to slaughter on an unprecedented level, not to mention the new horror of such biological weapons as mustard gas. The second war featured the wholesale annihilation of over six million Jews, not to mention the numbers of gypsies, homosexuals, political criminals and others who fell in the clutches of the Nazis – as well as the millions who fell to Stalin’s pogroms in the Soviet Union. This second war did not end until the United States killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese with two nuclear bombs. Between the two wars ran one of the most severe economic depressions in world history – and don’t forget the influenza epidemic that ravaged much of the Western world starting in 1918. Novelists George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) and Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) acquired much of their cynicism during their time period, as did a group of playwrights in Europe, who would be later considered the creators of the Theater of the Absurd. Their plays posited a godless existence, in which human effort was worthless and existence had no significance (Esslin). All dialogue and action tail off into silence. This group included Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet; however, one of the most renowned of these playwrights was the French-Romanian Eugene Ionesco.
As a young boy, Ionesco grew up in France; one summer day, he had an experience that would end up shaping his worldview: “[w]alking in…a white-washed provincial village under an intense blue sky, [he] was profoundly altered by the light” (Gaensbauer). At the time, he felt like he was floating in the air; afterward, after the light had gone, he noticed the fruits of entropy around him – corruption, rot and the insignificant toil that occupies so much of people’s time, until they die (Ionesco). After graduating and becoming a French teacher, he married Rodica Burileanu; they had a daughter, and some of his first writing took the form of children’s stories for her. Around the age of 40, Ionesco turned to plays after first penning a satirical biography of Victor Hugo (according to Ionesco, Hugo’s prominence in French letters was highly overblown) (Gaensbauer). This work focuses on the scurrilous events that happened to Hugo; the nonsensical way in which Hugo acts like a tyrant to those around him is a precursor to several of the characters in his plays.
Ionesco turned to writing drama after he started taking an English class. The teaching method involved writing out entire sentences and memorizing them. Reading back the sentences he had copied, though, Ionesco felt like he was reading a bizarre narrative about a set of characters (Ionesco). Because the sentences in a language primer often sound silly in isolation, it didn’t take much for him to view his lessons as a parody of language (Gaensbauer). He turned this experienced into his first play, a one-act nonsensical piece called La Cantatrice Chauve, which opened in 1950 (Lamon). Instead of proceeding like traditional plays, this one uses a series of repetitions, one often moving faster than the one previous, until the entire play breaks down. The words do not cohere into a dialogue that makes sense, but instead takes the form of a series of nonsensical phrases and sentences that do not share a connection. His other one-act plays, including La Lecon, Les Chaises, and Jacques ou la soumission work in much the same way.
Ionesco’s first full-length play was Tueur sans gages, released in 1959, Ionesco moved to a more traditional structure, to sustain reader interest as well as to apply his philosophical views to existing storylines in ways other than simply detonating them. One of Ionesco’s recurring characters is Berenger, who represents Ionesco’s perspective in the plays (and who shares some of Ionesco’s traits). A serial killer comes after him in Tueur sans gages; in Rhinoceros, he is the only one of his friends who does not turn into one of the horned beasts (a slap at the modern forces that require conformity to ideological viewpoints) (Gaensbauer). In Le Roi se muert, he plays King Berenger I, who has to adjust to the idea that he, too, will eventually die. Other plays included Soif et la faim, Macbett (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth), and Ce formidable bordel.
While other playwrights pushed the bounds of comprehension even further than Ionesco, he is known for his deconstruction of the traditional screenplay by using the non sequitur throughout his shorter plays and interspersed in his longer plays to express the chaos of everyday life. One of his predominant themes was the dangers of forced conformity to a set of ideological values, as such plays as Rhinoceros demonstrate. This was the play that brought him the most recognition (Kelly), because of successful performances in London by Laurence Olivier, and on Broadway by Zero Mostel, both of whom played the befuddled Berenger to a tee. His most important contributions to the art of playwriting are the new freedoms in form and his fierce insistence on autonomy of the mind. Le Roi su muert, translated as Exit the King, is one of the more commonly staged plays today. The milieu that Ionesco creates is founded on the notion of chaotic hyperbole, a society collapsing minute by minute – a context with which the modern viewer can easily relate, given the geopolitical events of the past two decades. At times, directors forget to have the entire set, all characters, and all costumes slowly decay with the king (Maga), as Ionesco would have doubtless preferred, as the extended metaphor of decay works best if it happens to the entire cast, instead of just the king.
Going forward, though, what is the legacy of Beckett, Ionesco and the other creators of the Theater of the Absurd? Once form has been compromised and scattered to the winds, what is left? Obviously, a return to the more traditional narrative form is the only option – but where are today’s Becketts and Stoppards and Millers? They appear have moved behind the camera, as independent film has taken off as an art form. Because of the growing need for multisensory stimuli in audiences, musicals and movies have supplanted plays. Because of the video quality available in increasingly inexpensive cameras, moving over to the realm of film is more and more accessible for artists in different socioeconomic sectors. Also, the editing capability that goes along with film and audio simply does not exist on the stage. While this requires a different form of art for the playwright to establish a variety of existential ideas, the truth is that it is much easier for the film director to play with concepts of time, perspective, and point of view than it is for the playwright. This is not to say that the theater stage is on its way out, but it is worth saying that if the ancient Greeks had had cable television, no one would have gone to watch the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles – waiting for the Chorus to tell you what’s going to happen simply wouldn’t fly in our era of the infinitesimal attention span. The next Ionescos are in the process of creating and distributing experimental film (think Wim Wenders as a bridge). Whether or not experimental art is about to collapse beneath the weight of our collective loss of intellectual stamina, in terms of an ability to pay attention to a complex argument presented in a disjointed manner, would be worth following – if my rerun of “Two and a Half Men” weren’t about to come back from commercial break.
Works Cited
Esslin, Martin. The Theater of the Absurd. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969.
Gaensbauer, Deborah B. Eugene Ionesco Revisite. New York: Twayne Publishers,
1996.
Ionesco, Eugene. Fragments of a Journal. Trans. Jean Stewart. London: Faber and
Faber, 1968.
Ionesco, Eugene. “La tragedie du langage.” Spectacles Vol. 2, July 1958.
Kelly, Kevin. “The Absurd Dramatic Legacy of Eugene Ionesco.” Boston Globe 1 April
1994. Web. Retrieved 14 November 2011 from http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8273054.html
Lamon, Rosette. Ionesco’s Imperative: The Politics of Culture. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993.
Maga, Carly. “Soulpepper Steps into Kingdom of the Absurd with Exit the King.”
Torontoist 17 August 2011. Web. Retrieved 14 November 2011 from http://torontoist.com/2011/08/exit_the_king/
