![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/84770f_40bdbae41c4a004817a1b4b321718ad3.jpg/v1/fill/w_1280,h_800,al_c,q_85,enc_auto/84770f_40bdbae41c4a004817a1b4b321718ad3.jpg)
Eugène Ionesco's Plays
Eugene Ionesco was a pioneer in the Theater of the Absurd. He was 36 when he wrote this first play and he had rejected theater as an art form until this time. Once he saw the potentials for visual imagery on the stage and the staging of the “impossible” as storytelling tools he found his way in, writing 28 plays, before his death in 1994. He was greatly influenced by Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud as well as his contemporaries Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. He is most well known for his “antiplay” which is characterized by the deconstruction of dramatic structure and logic that Ionesco began with his first play. His plays were not mimetic or realistic in any way and strove to represent the unrepresentable. One author wrote that he strove to “make the mechanics of drama function in a vacuum" (Milutinovic 341). Some of the major themes of his work are cycles, an absence of logic, society as a machine, rhythm in place of action, dreams, and death.
Here is a list of Ionesco’s most notable plays:
The Bald Soprano – Deals with no sense of logic and has a cyclical and apathetic feel to the end
The Lesson – Possibly influenced by Jarry’s Ubu Roi character, the tutor in this story is an exaggerated figure who goes through a metamorphosis of personality throughout the play before killing his student and beginning the cycle again
The Chairs – Ionesco’s first foray into the power of visual imagery on stage, expores staging of absence and rhythm as a substitute for action
Amédée – Ionesco’s first full length play, based on a short story about a corpse that grows continuously, begins a long string of plays in which Ionesco explores the theme of death
The Berenger Plays:
1. The Killer – the first play centered on Berenger, an Everyman character, avenging his lover’s death, Ionesco explores the experience of transcendence and the disappointment that follows
2. Rhinoceros – Tells the story of a society in which everyone becomes a rhinoceros, a direct parallel of Ionesco’s experience watching his friends become fascists even though they had renounced it adamantly
3. Exit the King – Ionesco’s experience with death and a continuation of his exploration of aging and decay, rhythm is a very important component of this play
4. A Stroll in the Air – the final play in the Berenger series, explores what happens when a man gains the ability to break the holds of gravity, set in England
Killing Game – “I doubt whether any play has ever been written in which so many deaths occur” – Ionesco, this play consists of scene after scene of characters dying from the plague, the few that remain alive are then killed by a great fire, a parallel to the plague and fires of London
Macbett – Ionesco’s reworking of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he does away with a “good” guy and “bad” guy and creates conflict between characters that are all equally reprehensible
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6d633c_253f50fe1a134ccfbbc43d285114dc93~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_153,h_195,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/6d633c_253f50fe1a134ccfbbc43d285114dc93~mv2.jpg)
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6d633c_aa09bc2ad2214127b6adb2de59a3f8d1~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_154,h_195,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/6d633c_aa09bc2ad2214127b6adb2de59a3f8d1~mv2.jpg)
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6d633c_b3b4ad3406464e63963cd7e48a25d6a8~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_208,h_170,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/6d633c_b3b4ad3406464e63963cd7e48a25d6a8~mv2.jpg)
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6d633c_27878d2573a84ab492bda426e601a840~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_189,h_160,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/6d633c_27878d2573a84ab492bda426e601a840~mv2.jpg)
Themes in Well Known Plays
His first two plays, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson both end with scenes that repeat the action of the first scene, creating a sense of cycles and the infinite loops that these stories can take even with their lack of logic. The Bald Soprano tells the story of two couples and the final tableau is the same as the first tableau with the opposite couple substituted in. Ionesco did this to show the interchangeable nature of the couples, which ruins any illusion of the importance of their individual identity. In The Lesson, the play ends with the tutor killing his student and the next student arriving. There is no sense of an end to any of these cycles.
​
The Chairs is a great example of Ionesco’s fascination with the absence of logic and absence of anything. He sets his audience up for spectacle only to leave them with nothing. In this play his characters wait onstage for an Orator to arrive to deliver an important message, possibly the meaning of life. The two old characters talk to many “guests” who never appear onstage. He wrote that the audience “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… the interest lies elsewhere….The tightly packed crowd of nonexistent beings should acquire an entirely objective existence of their own” (Hayman 52). This play also shows the beginnings of Ionesco’s interest in stage images as part of the plot. The play ends with the Orator arriving and only being able to speak in gibberish to a set of empty chairs. There is a sound cue at this moment that is the sound of an audience even though there is no one on stage and Ionesco found this to be the most important moment of the play because it staged absence itself.
​
An idea Ionesco references often in his books and interviews is the sense that society is becoming a machine, mirroring the industrialization occurring throughout Europe and America. He said in an interview, "A machine that gets out of control is a machine that works too well, so well that everything is turned into part of the machine" (Hayman 25). His play Rhinoceros is his best example of this phenomenon. It shows how the society is metamorphosed from humans to rhinoceros’ and had strong parallels to the political climate of the time in which Ionesco watched many of his friends who had once fought against fascism become fascists.
​
Amédée was Ionesco’s first full-length play and it examined death, a favorite topic of Ionesco. In his Fragments… he writes that “we are in life in order to die” (Ionesco 25). This is one of many passages in his journals about death and his realization and rejection of its existence. He writes, "it's to Death, above all, that I say 'Why?' with such terror. Death alone can, and will, close my mouth" (Ionesco 27). He also said in an interview, “Death is unacceptable and the conditions existing in heaven are almost equally unacceptable if our condition is reflected in that of heaven“ (Hayman 16). His pessimistic and dismissive view of death is reflected in many of his plays with Amédée being his first venture into the topic. This play follows the story of a corpse that grows continually throughout the play in a small apartment. It is based on a short story Ionesco wrote which allowed him to realize the idea of the story without having to worry about staging it. This first exploration of death on stage spurred Ionesco on to many of his other projects examining this lifelong question.
Another play that examined death was Exit the King. Ionesco wrote this play in just 20 days, 10 while he was ill and 10 more a few weeks later after he had declined in health and then recovered again. One of the most interesting parts of this play is the dramatic shift in rhythms between the first second parts, written two weeks apart separated by Ionesco’s declining health. Ionesco describes it as “an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying” (Hayman 128). The marked shift in rhythm is intended to be acknowledged as a part of the story instead of seen as a problem. Ionesco’s own experience with death greatly influenced the writing of this piece and unlike his other pieces, which were explorations of an idea or based on his short stories, this piece was based on his idea for a ballet.
Works Cited:
​
Coe, Richard N. Eugene Ionesco. Grove Press Inc., 1961.
​
Hayman, Ronald. Eugene Ionesco. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1976.
​
Ionesco, Eugene. Fragments of a Journal. Grove Press Inc., 1968.
​
Milutinovic, Zoran. "The Death of Representation and the Representation of Death: Ionesco, Beckett, and Stoppard." Comparative Drama, vol. 40, no. 3, 2006, pp. 337-364.
​