Absurdist Theatre Notes – Ionesco

• Better theorist than playwright
• Saw the world as an object of simultaneous ridicule and pain
• Uses illogical words and stereotyped characters
• Never hesitated to speak and write of his intentions
• He is concerned with expressing the absence of meaning in life
• Portrays ‘the tragedy of language’
• Uses ‘characters without character’
• Arthur Adamov – committed to the social realist cause aimed to emphasize man’s loneliness and the world’s meaninglessness
• Fernando Arrabal – writes strongly subjective and black comedies using violence to the point of sadism
• Joseph Chiari – ‘if there is no communication possible between people in an absurdist world, why try to write an absurdist play in the first place?’
• Ionesco – ‘A playwright simply writes plays, in which he can offer only a testimony, not a didactic message… Any work of art which was ideological and nothing else would be pointless… I simply hold that it is difficult to make oneself understood, not absolutely impossible’
• Ionesco – ‘No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute; it is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa’
• He believes that there is a need to break down the language of society, which ‘is nothing but clichés, empty formulas and slogans’
• Concerned with objective reality and social realism
• ‘Revolution consists in bringing about a change in mental attitudes’
• Ending of The Bald Prima Donna could not be found so it was decided that instead of ending the play it would start again
• He considered this play to be ‘a tragic spectacle of human life reduced to passionless automatism through bourgeois convention and fossilization of language’