The Chairs: Glossary

Compiled by Celise Kalke with help from Jessica Rosen

Henry VII
As far as either Martin Platt, or Celise Kalke can figure out, there is no historical anecdote about Henry VII falling out of a window into a body of water. The French king cited was Francis II, who also didn't fall out of a window into a body of water. So the Old Woman is muddled. Henry VII was the first king of the Tudor dynasty, and was know for being very tight-fisted with money.

sunspots
dark spots that appear from time to time on the sun's surface consisting commonly of a blue-black unbra with a surrounding penumbra of lighter shade and usually visible only with the telescope.

the way the world goes round and round and round and round
This may be a quote of the Gertrude Stein Children's book "The World is round"

Semiramis
Semiramis was the ancient Warrior Queen of Assyria who may have built Babylon.

Stan Laurel
Ionesco's stage directions ask the actor playing the Old Man to imitate a gesture (scratching his head) made famous by Stan Laurel. Half of the comic pair Laurel and Hardy. The absurdists were very influenced by all the silent film comics, esp. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and the Marx Brothers. Laurel and Hardy made nearly 90 comedies from 1927 to 1951. Laurel, the bumbling and easily distressed innocent, acted as foil to the pompous and overbearing Hardy, whose confident mien was as unwarranted as his partner's fearful timidity. The pair frequently managed to convert simple, everyday situations into disastrous tangles by acts of incredible na•vetŽ and stupidity.

"Paris sera toujours Paris" or "Paris will always be Paris"
French lyrics of a song by Maurice Chevalier.

1. Par prŽcaution on a beau mettre
Des croisillons ˆ nos fen�tres
Passer au bleu nos devantures
Et jusqu'aux pneus de nos voitures
DŽsentoiler tous nos musŽes
Chambouler les Champs ElysŽes
Emmailloter de terre battue
Toutes les beautŽs de nos statues
Voiler le soir les rŽverb�res
Plonger dans le noir la ville lumi�re

{Refrain:}

Paris sera toujours Paris !
La plus belle ville du monde
MalgrŽ l'obscuritŽ profonde
Son Žclat ne peut �tre assombri
Paris sera toujours Paris !
Plus on rŽduit son Žclairage
Plus on voit briller son courage
Plus on voit briller son esprit
Paris sera toujours Paris !
2. Pour qu'ˆ ce bruit chacun s'entra”ne
On peut la nuit jouer d'la sir�ne
Nous contraindre ˆ faire le zouave
En pyjama dans notre cave
On aura beau par des ukases
Nous couper l'veau et m�me le jazz
Nous imposer le masque ˆ gaz
Des mots croisŽs ˆ quatre cases
Nous obliger dans nos demeures
A nous coucher tous ˆ onze heures

{Refrain:}

3. Bien que ma foi, depuis octobre
Les robes soient beaucoup plus sobres
Qu'il y ait moins d'fleurs et moins d'aigrettes
Que les couleurs soient plus discr�tes
Bien qu'aux galas on Žlimine
Les chinchillas et les hermines
Que les bijoux pleins de dŽcence
Brillent surtout par leur absence
Que la beautŽ soit moins voyante
Moins effrontŽe moins provocante...

{Refrain:}

post-Marxists
Post-Marxist thinking is that which insists of continual social reform because of the unpredictability of the future. So it grows out of Marx's ideas about social reform on class lines, but sees this reform as a continuos process with no end in sight.

The post-Marxists attack the Marxist notion of class analysis from various perspectives. On the one hand, they claim that it obscures the equal or more significant importance of cultural identities (gender, ethnicity). They accuse class analysts of failing to explain gender and ethnic differences within classes. They then proceed further to argue that these "differences" define the nature of contemporary politics. The second line of attack on class analysis stems from a view that class is merely an intellectual constructionit is essentially a subjective phenomenon that is culturally determined. Hence, there are no "objective class interests" that divide society since "interests" are purely subjective and each culture defines individual preferences. The third line of attack argues that there have been vast transformations in the economy and society that have obliterated the old class distinctions. In "post-industrial" society, some post-Marxists argue, the source of power is in the new information systems, the new technologies and those who manage and control them. Society, according to this view, is evolving toward a new society in which industrial workers are disappearing in two directions: upward into the "new middle class" of high technology and downward into the marginal "underclass".

Excerpt by James Petras, in Links, #9, November 1997 Ð February 1998

fundamentalists
A movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic (often religious based on literal interpretation of a text) principles.

environmentalists
an advocate of environmentalism, which advocates the preservation or improvement of the natural environment.

Pope Paul
The French play just refers to "the pope." Pope Paul VI became pope slightly after the play was written, in 1963. Of course Pope John Paul II is the current pope.

Field Marshall
the highest ranking military officer (in the British army at least).

"where are the snows of yesteryear"
Quote from Medieval French poet Francois Villon:

Ballade (of the Ladies of Ancient Times)
Tell me where, or in what land,
is Flora the fair Roman girl,
Archipiada, or Tha•s,
who was her match in beauty's hall,
Echo who answered when one called
over rivers or still pools,
whose loveliness was more than human?
Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Where is HŽlo•se, so wise, for whom
Pierre Abelard was first unmanned
then cloistered up at Saint Denis?
For her love he bore these trials.
And where now can one find that queen
by whose command was Buridan
thrown in a sack into the Seine?

Queen Blanche, light as a lily,
who sang with a mermaid's voice,
Bertha Bigfoot, Beatrice, Alice,
Arembourg, heiress to Maine,
and Joan the good maid of Lorraine
whom the English griddled at Rouen;
where are they, where, O Sovereign Virgin?
Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Prince, don't ask me in a week
or in a year what place they are;
I can only give you this refrain:
Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Fran�ois Villon c.1461 Translation: (c) Robin Shirley, 1993

Tristan to your Isolde
principal characters of a famous medieval love-romance of unconsumated love.

The young Tristan ventures to Ireland to ask the hand of the princess Isolde for his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, and succeeds in his mission. On the homeward journey Tristan and Isolde, by misadventure, drink the love potion prepared by the queen for her daughter and King Mark. Henceforward, the two are bound to each other by an imperishable love that dares all dangers and makes light of hardships but does not destroy their loyalty to the king.

The greater part of the romance is occupied by plot and counterplot: Mark and the courtiers seeking to entrap the lovers, who escape the snares laid for them until finally Mark gets what proof of their guilt. Tristan escapes by a miraculous leap from a chapel on the cliffs and rescues Isolde. The lovers flee into the forest of Morrois and remain there until one day Mark discovers them asleep with a naked sword between them. Soon afterward they make peace with Mark, and Tristan agrees to restore Isolde to Mark and leave the country and marries someone else.

Wounded by a poisoned weapon, Tristan sends for Isolde, who alone can heal him. If she agrees to come, the ship on which she embarks is to have a white sail; if she refuses, a black. His jealous wife, who has discovered his secret, seeing the ship approach on which Isolde is hastening to her lover's aid, tells him that it carries a black sail. Tristan, turning his face to the wall, dies, and Isolde, arriving too late to save her love, yields up her life in a final embrace. A miracle follows their deaths: two trees grow out of their graves and intertwine their branches so that they can not be parted by any means.

Offsetlithographer
offset is a kind of printing process in which an inked impression froma plate is first made on a rubber-blanketed cylinder and then transferred to the paper being printed. A lithographer is a printer from a plane surface on which the image is printed is ink-receptive.

sycophants
servile self-seeking flatterer

Pyrenees
A mountain range on the border of France of Spain.

poseur
an affected or insincere person, someone who poses at or pretends to be something or someone they aren't.

Ribble
Ribble Valley is the largest district in Lancashire, England in terms of area, comprising 224 square miles of market towns, picturesque villages and rolling countryside. In the French translation he's from the Berry in the Loire valley of France.

Other References not directly in text:

Job
[Note: The Emperor's entrance in The Chairs may be inspired by the final section of the Biblical book of Job, where Job talks directly to Yahweh.]

Job is pictured as an ideal patriarch who has been rewarded for his piety with material prosperity and happiness. The Satan (Accuser), a member of the heavenly council of Yahweh, acts with Yahweh's permission as an agent provocateur to test whether or not Job's piety is rooted in self-interest. Faced with the appalling loss of his worldly possessions, his children, and finally his own health, Job refuses to curse Yahweh. His capacity for trusting Yahweh's goodness has made him an unsurpassed model of patience. . . . Job's physical suffering is the outward symbol of his intense inward agony, the agony of a man who feels himself lost in a meaningless universe and abandoned even by God.

What torments Job is the question of the justice of God and the justice and honor of man before God. His passionate pleading of his own righteousness and his calling upon God for a hearing lead him to an encounter with God. This encounter does not answer the question of why the innocent suffer, but it is the only answer to the plea of a man seeking to find his God and to justify himself to him. The complacent believer who has been shattered by suffering, doubt, and despair is confirmed in faith and repents.

From The Encyclopedia Britannica

Ionesco Chronology of Important Dates

Adapted from Ionesco: A collection of Critical Essays edited by Rosette C. Lamont

Ionesco in his own words:
writing about theatre and The Chairs

Note: Eugene Ionesco lived from 1912-1995. His father was Romanian, and his mother Parisian, but he lived most of his life in Paris. Early on in his studies he discovered that two opposing viewpoints can be equally valid. Thus dialectic leads naturally to the absurd. At the age of 36, Ionescco wrote his first play, The Bald Soprano in 1948. He wrote The Chairs in 1951 and 1952.

Laughter. . . laughter. . . , certainly I cannot say I do not try to arouse laughter; however, that is not my most important object! Laughter is merely the by-product of a dramatic conflict that one sees on the stage-or that one does NOT see if the play is a comedy, but then it is still implied-and laughter comes as a reprieve: we laugh so as not to cry. . . .

Eugene Ionesco, Interview, 1949

When I manage to detach myself from the world and feel able to take a good look at it, it seem to me to be comic in its improbability. . . . the absurd is conceived as being in some way an intrinsic part of existence. Now for me, intrinsically, everything that exists is logical, there is nothing absurd about it. It is the consciousness of being and existing that is astonishing. . . And I believe I am a comic writer thanks to this faculty, not only for observation, but for detachment, for being able to stand outside myself.

Eugene Ionesco, Interview, 1949

[A theatrical character] must be as comic as he is moving, as distressing as he is ridiculous. Besides, one cannot pull perfect characters out of oneself, for an author is not perfect: he is a fool, like the rest of mankind!

Eugene Ionesco, Interview, 1949

I think that man must either be unhappy (metaphysically unhappy) or stupid.

Eugene Ionesco

I write in order to find out what I think.

Eugene Ionesco

It remains to be seen, for example, how it comes about that a playwright like Feydeau, although the technique and mechanics of his theatre are beyond reproach, is not nearly so great as other playwrights whose technique may or may not be so perfect. In one sense, it is because everyone is a philosopher: by that I mean that everyone discovers some part of reality, the part that he can discover for himself. When I say 'philosopher', I don't not mean the specialist in philosophy, who merely exploits other peoples' vision of the world. In so far as an artist has a personal apprehension of reality, he is a true philosopher. And his greatness is a result of the breadth, the depth and acuity of his authentically philosophical insight, of his living philosophy. The quality of a work of art directly depends on how 'alive' philosophy is, on the fact that it springs from life and not from abstract thought. A philosophical system withers away as soon as a new philosophy or a new system goes a step further. Works of art, however, which are live philosophies, do not invalidate one another. That is why they can co-exist. The great works of art and the great poets seem to find confirmation, completion and corroboration in one another; Aeschylus is not cancelled out by Calder—n, or Shakespeare by Chekov, or Kleist by a Japanese Noh-Noh play. One scientific theory can cancel out another, but the truth found in works of art complement one another. Art seems the best justification for belief in the possibility of a metaphysical liberalism.

Notes and Counter-Notes: Experience of the Theatre, Eugene Ionesco

At certain moments the world seems to be devoid of meaning, and reality seems unreal. It is this feeling of the unreal, the search for an essential reality, forgotten and nameless-apart from which I do not feel that I exist-that I have tried to express through these characters of mine who wander about inarticulately, having nothing of their own aside from their anguish, their remorse, their frustration, the emptiness of their lives. Being submerged in the meaningless cannot be other than grotesque, their tragedy can only excite laughter. Since I find the world incomprehensible, I am waiting for someone to explain it to me..."

Eugene Ionesco

"the absence of people...the absence of God...the unreality of the world, metaphysical emptiness. The theme of [The Chairs] is nothingness."

Eugene Ionesco

It is seven years since my first play [The Bald Soprano] was acted in Paris. It was a tiny failure, a minor scandal. The Failure of my second play was . . . a bit more resounding, and the scandal a little more serious. It was with Les Chaises in 1952 that things really began to happen: eight disgruntled people were in the audience every night, but rumors about the play were already beginning to reach a much greater number of people in Paris and as far as the German frontier. With my third, fourth, fifth, and so on up to my eighth play, each flop became more and more gigantic: protestations floated across the Channel, over the Pyrenees and into Germany, passed the frontiers of Spain and Italy and took the boat for England. Can quantity turn into quality? I think it can, since ten flops have now proved successful. If I go on having failures like this, I shall soon have achieved a positive triumph.

Ionesco, Fragment from a letter 1957

"It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind."

Eugene Ionesco

I have called my comedies 'anti-plays' or 'comic dramas', and my dramas 'pseudo-dramas' or 'tragic farces': for it seems to me that comic and tragic are one, and that the tragedy of man is pure derision. The contemporary critical mind takes nothing too seriously or too lightly. In Victimes du Devoir I tried to sink comedy in tragedy: in [The Chairs] tragedy in comedy, or, if you like, to confront comedy and tragedy in order to link them in a new dramatic synthesis. But it is not a true synthesis, for these two elements do not coalesce, they coexist: one constantly repels the other, they show each other up, criticize and deny one another and, thanks to their opposition, thus succeed dynamically in maintaining a balance and creating tension.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-notes

The Theatre is more than words: drama is story that is lived and relived with each performance, and we can watch it live.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-notes

The theme of [The Chairs] is absence.

On stage there is nothing; the two old people have hallucinations, the invisible characters are not there. Or again there really is nobody there at all, not even the two old people. . . .They are as non-existent as the invisible ones or our dreams. . . . But why should one see anyone at all [in the play]? . . . .the two or three characters you do see in [The Chairs] are in a way only what might be called the pivots of some mobile construction, largely invisible, evanescent, precarious, doomed to vanish like the world; for the characters themselves are unreal and yet the indispensable foundation of the whole structure.

Or again it is all neither real nor unreal (what would that really mean?), but merely visible or invisible. And yet this nothing that is on the stage is [a] crowd. One must feel the presence of the crowd. So it is all the same whether you say there is nothing or a crowd of people on the stage.

Ionesco, 1951

Give yourself up to The Chairs, I beg you. Do not minimize its effects, whether it be the large number of chairs, the large number of bells that announce the arrival of the invisible guests or the lamentations of the old woman, who should be like a weeping woman in Corsica or Jerusalem; everything should be exaggerated, excessive, painful, childish, a caricature, without finesse. It would be as serious a fault to mould the play as to mould the actors' interpretations. As for the latter, one only needs to press a button and start them moving: tell them all the time not to stop half-way but to follow right through and go all out. There must be plenty of great tragedy and biting irony. Allow yourself for a time to be molded by the play.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, "Les Chaises"

Why can one see the Orator and not those other characters who crowd upon the stage? does the Orator truly exist, is he real? Answer: he exists neither more nor less than the other characters. He is as invisible as the others, he is as real or as unreal, neither more nor less. Only one cannot do without his visible presence. He must be seen and heard because he is the last to remain on stage. But that he should be visible is a purely arbitrary convention, the only way of overcoming an otherwise insoluble technical problem.. . . All the characters could have made visible if a striking enough method had been found of conveying theatrically their impalpable reality.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, "Les Chaises"

By the end of the play all [invisible characters and visible characters] must create a 'shock'. The very last scene, after the disappearance of the old couple and the Orator's departure, must be very long: the sound of murmuring, of wind and water, should be heard for a very long time, as though coming from nothing, coming from the void. Thus the audience will not be tempted into giving the easiest explanation of the play, the wrong one. They must not be able to say, for example, that the old couple are mad or in their dotage and suffering from hallucinations; neither must they be able to say that the invisible characters are only the old couple's remorse and memories. This may perhaps be true up to a point, but it has absolutely no importance; the interest lies elsewhere.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, "Les Chaises"

Contemporary drama is almost exclusively psychological, social, cerebral or . . . poetic. It is ametaphysical. [The Chairs] is an attempt to push beyond the present frontiers of drama.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, "Les Chaises"

To explain the end of Les Chaises: " . . . .The world is a desert. Peopled by phantoms with plaintive voices, it whispers lovesongs over the gaping ruins of my emptiness! But gentle ghosts, return!" (GŽrard de Nerval, Promenades et Couvenirs.) It could perhaps be that, without the gentleness.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, "Les Chaises"

Ionesco described by his critics and peers

The Theatre of the Absurd . . . can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time. The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by [World War II]. By 1942, Albert Camus was calmly putting the question why, since life had lost all meaning, man should not seek escape in suicide. In one of the great, seminal heart-searching's of our time, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tried to diagnose the human situation in a world of shattered beliefs.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

A world that can be explain by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.

Albert Camus, 1942

[A feeling] of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition is, broadly speaking, the theme of the plays of Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet, and the other writers discussed in the book.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

A . . sense of the senselessness of life, of the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose, is also the theme of much of the work of dramatists like Giraudoux, Anouilh, Salacrou, Sartre, and Camus himself. Yet these writers differ from the dramatists of the Absurd in an important respect: they present their sense of the irrationality of the human condition in the form of highly lucid and logically constructed reasoning, while the Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. While Sartre or Camus express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed. In some senses, the theatre of Sartre and Camus is less adequate as an expression of the philosophy of Sartre and Camus-in artistic, as distinct from philosophic, terms-than the Theatre of the Absurd.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

At the midpoint of our century, an ethical theater of ideas evolved in France, the offspring of an ironic consciousness shaped by the German occupation. It was a time when a whole people felt estranged within the confines of their own land. Their enemies were not solely the occupying foreign forces, but some of their nationals who sided with the enemy. Deeply divided, France was no longer one country but two: the collaborationists and the Resistance fighters.

Never had there been a greater need to address a large audience of one's compatriots than in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. For many years the French lived under the pall of censorship. The presence of the enemy in their capital, and even within their homes, where officers were billeted, had imposed a heavy silence on an articulate, lucid, free people. The Liberation meant more than political freedom; it was a time for regaining a sense of self as well as the feeling of belonging once again to a nation.

During the time of their imprisonment, French playwrights made a fine art of speaking indirectly, in coded language, in parables. They skirted censorship regulations by rereading and rewriting familiar classical texts. . . . . the new theatre had a secret agenda: to lend a voice to a gagged people, to speak to them and for them above the heads of the collaborators, the police, and the leaders of the occupying forces. These highly political plays are parables, disguised orations, secular sermons. They are informed by the highest moral purpose: to lend the imprisoned nation strength, convey hope, teach patience, courage, and tenacity.

. . . .Although of the same generation as [these Resistance playwrights] Eug�ne Ionesco and Samuel Beckett went further in their exploration of despair, that sickness of the void that the Existentialists call "angst" or "nausea." . . .Beckett and Ionesco offer no solution to problems in their work. Their literature neither teaches nor preaches; it is not didactic. They did not feel they could express their apprehension by way of a conventional form, a well-wrought play. Instead, they invented a dramaturgy suited to the crystallization on the stage of images from their inner world.

Rosette C. Lamont, Ionesco's Imperatives

When [World War II] ended, Ionesco was almost thirty-three. There was nothing to indicate that he was soon to become a famous dramatist. In fact, he disliked the theatre intensely: 'I read fiction, essays, I went to the cinema with pleasure. I listened to music from time to time, I visited art galleries, but I hardly ever went to the theatre.'

Why did he dislike the theatre? He had loved it as a boy, but he had begun to dislike it ever since, 'I became aware of the strings, the crude strings of the theatre.' The acting of the cast embarrassed him, he felt embarrassed for the actors. 'Going to the theatre to me meant going to see people, apparently serious people, making a spectacle of themselves.'

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

Ionesco read [his first play, The Bald Soprano-inspired by the silly dialogues in an English as a second language text book] to a group of friends. They found it funny, although he believed himself to have written a very serious piece, 'the tragedy of language'. . . At first the director [of The Bald Soprano] tried to stage the play in a wildly parodistic style. But that did not work. Finally, all concerned realized that, to have its full effect, the text would have to be acted in deadly seriousness, like a play by Ibsen.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

The Chairs was Ionesco's third play to reach the stage, and it did not do so (in 1952) without the greatest difficulties. It took Sylvain Dhomme and the two actors of the old couple, Tsilla Chelton and Paul Chevalier, three months to find the style of acting suitable for the play-a mixture of extreme naturalness of detail and the utmost unusualness of the general conception. . . . Financially the venture proved a disaster. Only too often the empty chairs on the stage were matched by empty seats in the auditorium, and there were evenings when only five or six tickets were sold.

Four years later (1956) , when Jacques Mauclair revived The Chairs with the same acress, Tsilla Chelton, in the part of the old woman, the climate of opinion had changed; the performance at the Studio des Champs-ElysŽes was a great success.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

"Every Parisian who loves theatre (and I do not mean those who only run to avant-garde productions) will blush one day (ten or twenty years hence) when he'll have to admit at a social gathering that he missed seeing The Chairs. The play can wait, for it has all the time in the world. I myself believe it to be superior to Strindberg; it is a dark comedy, in the style of Moliere, a madly zany black comedy, scary and quizzical, poignant and always true. . . . It ought to be called a classic."

1956, Jean Anouilh, playwright

Ionesco's is a world of isolated robots, conversing in cartoonstrip balloons of dialogue that are sometime hilarious, sometimes evocative, and quite often neither.

Kenneth Tynan, English dramaturg and critic

Here at last [with Ionesco] was a self-proclaimed advocate of anti-theatre: explicitly antirealist and by implication anti-reality as well. Here was a writer ready to declare that words were meaningless and that all communication between human beings was impossible.

. . . the peril arises when [Ionesco's anti-theatre] is held up for general emulation as the gateway to the theatre of the future, that bleak new worlds from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished.

'Ionesco, man of destiny?', Observer, London, 22 June 1958, Kenneth Tynan

It was April 1960. . . .I had asked Ionesco's agent whether I could meet him. She invited me to a party at her house. . . . It was a very crowded party-Ionesco was surrounded by a crowd-so I was introduced to Mme. Ionesco. . .a diminutive lady of strikingly Oriental features. (She was actually Romanian.) To start the conversation I made some remarks about the play and the big success that it was. Surely, M. Ionesco must be very happy.

"Non, monsiur. Il est triste," came the surprising reply.

But why should he be sad?

"Il a peur de la mort." (He is afraid of death.)

Martin Esslin

No amount of clinical description can convey what it feels like, let us say, to be in love. A young person may have been told, may think he knows what it will be like, but when he really does have the experience, he will realize that any merely intellectual knowledge of it was not knowledge in any real sense. A poem, on the other hand, or a piece of music, can convey, to however limited an extent, the reality of feeling and experience. In the same way, Ionesco. . . is trying to make us experience with him what if feels like to be grappling with . . . basic human experience.

Ionesco's theatre is a poetic theatre, a theatre concerned with the communication of the experience of states of being, which are the most difficult matters to communicate; for language, consisting largely of prefabricated, congealed symbols, tends to obscure rather than to reveal personal experience. . . .That is why Ionesco has spoken of his own work as an attempt to communicate the incommunicable.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

Ionesco himself has always opposed the idea that, as an avant-garde author, he stands outside the mainstream of tradition. He insists that the avant-garde is a mere rediscovery of submerged parts of the main tradition [and sees himself] as part of a tradition including Sophocles and Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Kleist, and BŸchner, precisely because these authors are concerned with the human condition in all its brutal absurdity.

Only time can show to what extent Ionesco will become part of the mainstream of the great tradition. What is certain, however, is that his work constitutes a truly heroic attempt to break through the barriers of human communication.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

Suggested Reading:

Notes and Counter-Notes by Eugene Ionesco

Present Past/Past Present by Eugene Ionesco

Fragments of a Journal by Eugene Ionesco

Ionesco's Imperatives: The Politics of Culture by Rosette C. Lamonte

Suggested viewing

Any Chaplin Film, especially Modern Times and The Great Dictator
(both because of Chaplin's stylistic influence on Ionesco and for American version of absurd humor).

Any film featuring the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy.

Related plays

Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Noises Off by Michael Frayn
[For it's use of farcical conventions]

The Bald Soprano by Ionesco

Rhinoceros by Ionesco

Dumbwaiter, No Man's Land and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
[For their portrayal of a strong exterior force]