EUGÈNE IONESCO (1947-74)

French dramatist whose one-act "antiplay" La Cantatrice chauve (1950, The Bald Prima Donna) inspired a major revolution in dramatic techniques and inaugurated the "theatre of the absurd".

Ionesco was taken to France as an infant but returned to Romania in 1925. After obtaining a degree in French at the University of Bucharest he worked for a doctorate in Paris (1939) where after 1945 he made his home. While working as a proofreader he decided to learn English; the formal, stilted commonplaces of his textbook inspired the masterly catalog of senseless platitudes that constitutes La Cantatrice chauve. Its most famous scene in which two strangers who are exchanging banalities about the weather where they live and how many children they have, stumble upon the astoninshing discovery that they are indeed man and wife is a brilliant example of Ionesco´s recurrent themes of self-estrangement and the difficulty of communication.

In rapid succession Ionesco wrote a number of plays all developing the "antilogical" ideas of La Cantatrice chauve; these included brief and violently irrational sketches (e.g., Le Maitre first produced 1953; The Leader, published 1960) and also a series of more elaborate one-act plays in which many of his later themes -especially the fear and horror of death- begin to make their appearance.

Among these La Leçon (1951, The Lesson), Les Chaises (1952, The Chairs) and Le Nouveau Locataire (1955, The New Tenant) are notable successes.

By contrast it was only with difficulty that Ionesco mastered the techniques of the full-length play: Amédée (1954), Theur sans gages (1959, The Killer) and Le Rhinocéros (1959) lack the dramatic unity that he finally achieved with Le Roi se meurt (1962, Exit the King).

This success was followed by one of his best and most spectacular flights of philosophic fantasy, Le Piéton de l´air (1963, A Stroll in the Air). With La Soif et la faim (1966, Thirst and Hunger), however, he relapsed once again into a more fragmented type of construction.

Ionesco´s achievement lies in having popularized a wide variety of nonrepresentational and surrealistic techniques and in having made them acceptable to audiences conditioned to a naturalistic convention in the theatre. His success in this was facilitated by his pointed and vituperative brilliance as a critic (Notes et contre-notes, 1962, Notes and Counter Notes).

Ionesco´s later works show less concern with intellectual paradox and more with dreams, visions and exploration of the subconscious. His pessimism, springing from the awareness of the "absurdity" of an existence rendered meaningless by death, relaxed slightly after Le Roi se meurt.

At the same time, however, his political attitudes hardened and whereas earlier he described himself as a "right-wing anarchist", his Journal en miettes (1967, Fragments of a Journal) reveals him as one of the most implacable opponents of every kind of leftwing ideology.