Eugène Ionesco was born in 1906 (though he liked to tell people it was 1912) in Slatina, Romania to a Romanian father and a French Jewish mother. His father was a difficult man (to say the least) with flexible political convictions and an overlarge personality; thus it’s no surprise that the marriage ended in divorce—it is, however, surprising just how spectacularly.
Ionesco studied French Literature at the University of Bucharest and embarked on a career as a critic and translator. He came to the theatre late: he did not write his first play, The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve) until 1948—it was not performed until 1950 and has been performed continuously since 1952 at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris. Together with The Chairs (Les Chaises, 1952) and Jack, or The Submission (Jacques ou la Soumission, written in 1949, first performed in 1955), all three plays are early works, innovative one-act “nonsense plays”. Sketches really—he called them “anti-plays”—which express with surreal comic force the feelings of alienation and the futility of communication associated with Modernism. In them he parodies the conformism of both the middle class and the forms of conventional theatre: He rejects plot, instead taking his dramatic structure from accelerating rhythms, cyclical repetitions, disregarding coherent dialogue, and thereby depicting a world of mechanical, puppet-like characters who speak in non-sequiturs. Language becomes strained, with words and objects gaining a life of their own, increasingly overwhelming the characters and creating a sense of menace (and, of course, humor).
Writing in French, Ionesco was one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd—an artistic movement that grew out of the philosophy of Existentialism advanced by Jean-Paul Sartre and others. Though The Bald Soprano is one of his most famous plays, Jack, or The Submission is the most aggressive toward the middle class, and The Chairs is considered his finest and his first truly ‘poetic’ attempt at writing for the stage.
He died on March 28, 1994 and on that evening The Bald Soprano was performed at the Théâtre de la Huchette for the 11,944th since 1957.
RETURN to the "The End of Words: An Evening with Ionesco" main page.