Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994)

 

Eugene Ionesco was one of the forefathers of the Theatre of the Absurd theatre style. With his revolutionary new viewpoint on language, he transformed theatre by exposing its subverting, hollowness, and comic explosive strength, as well as its commanding strength. His compositions include nightmare settings with tragic, comical individuals whose surrealistic and horrific attempts to deal with life’s absurdity collapse.
His plays have been produced all over the world and have been translated into the majority of European languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew.
Ionesco’s success is that he promoted a wide range of illusionism and surrealistic approaches and made them acceptable to theatrical audiences conditioned to a naturalistic standard. His tragicomic fictions depict the absurdity of capitalist life, the meaninglessness of social customs, and contemporary civilization’s impotence and mechanical nature. His plays are based on weird, illogical, or surreal settings, and he employs methods such as the comic
Ionesco's success is that he promoted a wide range of illusionism and surrealistic approaches and made them acceptable to theatrical audiences conditioned to a naturalistic standard. His tragicomic farces depict the absurdity of bourgeois life, the meaninglessness of social customs, and contemporary civilization's futility and mechanical nature. His plays are based on weird, illogical, or surreal settings, and he employs methods such as the comic growth of
materials on stage until they overpower the characters. The clichés and monotonous maxims of polite speech emerge in unlikely or inappropriate circumstances, exposing the deadening futility of most human contact. Later works by Ionesco are less concerned with amusing intellectual contradiction and more concerned with dreams, visions, and the discovery of the psyche.
The Chairs (1952)
    Under a solitary dull lamp and a tangle of mismatched chairs hung at ceiling height, an old couple sits still and lifeless. They claim to have been married for 75 years and spend each night in their solitary house on a lonely island telling stories to pass the time. The Old Woman appeals to them (“Every night, I come to it new”), while the Old Man humiliates them for their outdated themes. He laments, “I’m sick to death with Tudor History.”
The stories easily fall into pieces of narratives as they are told, with all the important facts obscured by the passage of time. Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist masterpiece from 1952 is similar, rejecting traditional characters, psychology, and storyline in favor of voiceless, perplexing moments of existence. With the same wild energy and tempting elegance as those chairs dangling over the pairs in Garance Marneur’s design, Maria Aberg’s revival, employing Martin Crimp’s acclaimed translation, brings these moments together with the same wild energy and captivating beauty.
To reveal overtones of emotions even when the play appears to reject them, you need performances that go deep. In this sense, Janet Amsden’s Old Woman and Ciaran McIntyre’s Old Man are remarkable. He describes his sense of finally making a significant contribution to life by delivering his message to be the manufacturers- and, this being Ionesco, invisible guests. She expresses her disillusionment at his low-ranking job as a janitor and lusts; he expresses his sense of finally making a significant contribution to life by trying to deliver his message to the assembled- and, this being Ionesco, invisible guests.
There are a few darkly humorous lines, but this is primarily a gloomy study of major mid-century concepts. In the context of our aging population, it's conceivable to interpret it simply as a narrative about the terminal phase and how people can deal with it: the pair may be insane, or they could be acting out a fantasy to pass another long night.
However, Aberg’s approach is spot-on, with the production staying faithful to the play’s dark overtones. It depicts a chamber filled with hundreds of thousands of unseen individuals a few years after the Holocaust, revealing the last statement- given by the military orator- to be gibberish, and concludes with suicide. Finally, the old couple seemed to represent all that didn’t make sense or was destroyed completely in 1952. This drama presents a difficult view of that, and it might be difficult to relate to. But, in this small setting, its revolutionary energy and exhilarating intensity are undeniable.