Eugene Ionesco Forum

Eugene Ionesco

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i really need to learn about la lecon too because im doin it in college and ive gone to barely any lectures!

>>By mel (Saturday, 25 Jan 2003 19:38)

i want to know how Ionesco and theatre of ubsurd differ from other cultures of theatre

>>By m (Saturday, 25 Jan 2003 19:38)

would like to know as much as possible on the bald soprano, ie themes etc.

>>By k (Saturday, 25 Jan 2003 19:38)

i need to know how to make the rhinos sound beautiful

>>By yani (Sunday, 2 Feb 2003 16:09)

Ionescu is great.I absolutely loved all his plays and what he did for theatre is revolutionary.I best like The lesson

>>By raluca (Friday, 14 Mar 2003 08:00)

I would like to know more about the play the Chairs, I have a discussion to do on friday. I have been trying to find a copy in the near by libraries and I have been unsuccessful.

>>By clara (Wednesday, 9 Apr 2003 04:46)

how do you think 'The Bald Soprano' being an absurdist play may be considered 'Theatre of Revolt'?

>>By k (Wednesday, 23 Apr 2003 22:17)

I am directing Ionesco's The Lesson for a production at my high school, I love Ionesco and all the other absurdists, e-mail me at MMatador34@aol.com if you want to chat about Ionesco's plays or just the lesson, which I have devoted my entire senior year for, - MMatador34

>>By MMatador34 (Thursday, 24 Apr 2003 07:02)

what does he try to criticize in his plays

>>By j.r (Thursday, 15 May 2003 03:53)

I absolutely love Ionesco's existentialist belief about resistance of a foolish majority.

>>By Matthew (Thursday, 22 May 2003 02:08)

All i want is to be able to find a site that you can actually look at the script and have notes to help you understand what kind of man this genius actually was.

>>By Jonathan Nancarrow (Wednesday, 4 Jun 2003 14:39)

Eugene Ionesco, like a lot of writers working immediately after world war two was concerned with the corruptive influence of power- power in this instance being represented by the school master- and the powerless represented by the young female student. Like Beckett, Ionesco's work seems to show a disappointment in the way that language has failed us-leading us not to peace but to war, Hiroshima, Concentration Camps, etc- therefore in his work language can sometimes collapse into meaninglessness, representing the corrupt society ( remember that Ionesco was reacting in an immediate way to world war two)
which words have led us to. In The Lesson, power and knowledge are in the hands of the elite, who use this power and knowledge not to teach, or to liberate, but to oppress and to gain pleasure, in it's sexual and other forms. There are strong sexual themes which run through the lesson, the older man, lusting after the younger woman, the sexual pose whcih the student is left in. Sex, however, is a metaphor for power, and the inveitable corruption which power brings with it.

>>By DJM (Monday, 22 Dec 2003 04:53)

Further notes on Ionesco.

Probably the best book to read on this playwright is “The Theatre of the Absurd”, by Martin Esslin. There are a number of websites devoted to Ionesco.

Eugene Ionesco ( 1912-1994) is usually included amongst a group of dramatists known as the Absurdists, together with, most notably; Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter. However the “Theatre of the Absurd” was not a collection of artists working together towards a common vision. At the time that Beckett was writing “Waiting for Godot” or Ionesco was writing “The Lesson” the term “Theatre of the Absurd” did not even exist. Nor did the playwrights mix with each other socially or have, like the Fauves or the Surrealists, or most other artistic movements, an agreed upon manifesto which articulated their aesthetic vision. They worked, for the most part, in solitude, and came to playwriting late in life, Pinter originally an actor, Ionesco a proof-reader, and Samuel Beckett a University Lecturer, translator, spy for the French Resistance, and rat catcher amongst other things. It was only later, looking back at this style of work that critics and academics came to see similar themes and ideas, and recognised this type of play as having a specific style, known as Theatre of the Absurd.

The Theatre of the Absurd began in the Left Bank theatres of Paris in the 1950’s, where Ionesco’s work was first produced. The label is self-explanatory, that is, the characters in these plays seem to talk nonsense to each other in situations that make little sense. In “The Lesson” a schoolmaster kills student after student for no apparent reason and with no consequences to his teaching career. In “Rhinoceros”, people turn into rhinoceroses. However this is more than simple farce, these plays are a reaction to the loss of religious certainty which the western world experienced in the twentieth century, the gruesome killing fields of the first and second world wars, the experimentation with form that was the mark of modernist artists-Joyce, Kafka, Dali, Stravinsky, et al- and the tragic absurdity of nuclear warfare, leading to a situation in the 1950’s wherein mankind could destroy the entire world hundreds of times over simply by pressing a button. Seen in this way, our lives made no sense. They were absurd. Our lives were a kind of Theatre of the Absurd and these plays reflected this.

>>By DJM (Friday, 2 Jan 2004 09:27)

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