Ionesco: ‘Throw Them to the Rhinos!’
By Tom Murphy
Special to the Brazil Herald
RIO DE JANEIRO — Absurd.
That’s what most people thought when a new kind of theater hit the boards in New York, London and Paris in the early 1950s. Suddenly, dialogue didn’t make sense anymore; sets might include a bare stage with two people standing in dirt piles up to their waists or, on the other hand, extravagant and bizarre displays of the scenic art, like the enormous pair of feet which once served as the backdrop for a play by Eugene Ionesco. Worst of all, the sacred cow of continuity, i.e., the maintenance of a “realistic” time frame for every scene from start to finish, was slain, roasted and delightedly consumed.
At first, critics called it anti-theater.
Then, in 1961, critic Martin Eislin published a now-famous essay The Theater of the Absurd and a new movement in drama had earned its name.
One of the great men of that movement is in Brazil this month. He is Eugene Ionesco, of Romania, of France…of the Universe.
Act I
Ionesco.
Even the name sounds a little weird. A Brazilian senator back in the 1950s, when Ionesco’s plays were first being performed here, thought it referred to a United Nations agency.
In fact, it belongs to one of the founding fathers of the Theater of the Absurd. Other founders include the bizarre Samuel Beckett, reluctant winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, British playwright Harold Pinter and French playwright, novelist, ex-con and cat burglar Jean Genet.
Actually, the Theater of the Absurd has been misunderstood from the beginning. Even today many theater-goers and critics regard it as a kind of nonsense theater in which nothing makes sense and nothing is supposed to make sense.
Not so.
The master was here this week to tell us: “The ‘absurdity’ of these plays has a direct reference to the real world. It is emphatically not a joke. Rather, it is a denunciation of the absurd.”
Principally, it is a denunciation of conformity in modern life, a conformity which, for Ionesco, is best documented in the banality of contemporary speech. The dialogue of ordinary people in ordinary situations is, he observes, nothing more than a string of platitudes, of deliberate and convenient misunderstandings, of gossip. If the dialogue of an Ionesco play sounds ridiculous, it’s only because the dialogue of everyday life is ridiculous.
To be correct, then, it’s not absurd theater; it’s theater of the absurd.
Act II
The theater of the absurd was launched in 1950 by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. That was the year in which the former secretary to epoch-making novelist James Joyce completed his Waiting for Godot, still the most well-known play of the new genre. The work is a lengthy and often hilarious dialogue between two feckless vagabonds who are, apparently, awaiting the arrival of their new employer. The employer, however, will never come. The audience perceives this basic fact long before the two main characters do.
That was the same year Ionesco began his theatrical career in Paris. His early plays were commercial failures, however. “No, my first play was not a success,” he says. “At the premier, there were three people in the audience. Then, on the second night, there was only one. My wife. And she had already seen the play. On the third night, my wife had a toothache and there was no one in the audience at all.”
Ionesco only caught on in the late 50s with short plays like The Lesson and The New Tenant. But probably his most famous play is the longer Rhinoceros, first produced in 1960.
Rhinoceros is a classic work. Ionesco’s principal character, the slovenly Berenger, lives in a world of conformists so insecure that, one by one, they choose to literally become unthinking animals–in this particular case, rhinoceroses. Says one character, upon assuming his new identity, “we must move with the times!”
The figure of the rhinoceros–powerful, conformist and stupid–is ideal. Given the atomic bomb, the superpowers are no longer nations of sheep, but of rhinoceroses. Or, as Eugene McCarthy once said, “when the tough get going, the going gets tough.”
But there is something both haphazard and miraculous about the Theater of the Absurd. Like great scientific discoveries, breakthroughs in art happen by accident. Says Ionesco, “I started out trying to do a parody of middle class theater and I ended up doing something completely new.”
At first, the “something new” was an exposé of hypocrisy, particularly the tricky way such modern figures as the politician and the married couple have of twisting speech to their own purposes, hiding intentions in platitudes and hearing only those meanings which are convenient to themselves in the speech of others.
But later, says Ionesco, “I tried to translate the anxiety inherent in such situations; I attempted to ask questions about it.” Berenger is the first Ionesco character who asks. “How can we save the world, if you won’t?” he tells his girl friend. The answer, unfortunately, is a disappointment. “Why bother to save it?” she replies, stepping out of the house to join the rhinoceroses.
Back to the drawing board. But at least one man, Berenger, decides to remain human.
ACT III
Ionesco, who will be 70 in November, looks just the way you would expect a bemused anarchical European playwright to look. He favors rumpled, slightly over-sized suits with turtle-neck sweaters underneath. He walks with a little shuffle, almost like Charlie Chaplin when he was 70. When out of doors, he wears a flat, tweedy cap. Ionesco smiles with his eyes. When he’s really amused, he sticks his tongue out the side of his mouth.
At a series of conferences and readings in Rio last week, he talked about his life, his art and his current views on things. He was best before a packed house at the Maison de France. Said the master:
On German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who is often contrasted to Ionesco: “Brecht is ideological. For that reason, his characters do not really live in his plays. All ideology eventually sanctifies itself. For that reason, a playwright can never be ideological.”
On politics: “I have a very simple politics. I detest war. I detest tyranny. I detest economic inequality. But I am not of the left. I have no ideology. Yet, I believe that it is impossible to separate the political theme from the theater. What is Macbeth but a play about politics?”
On death, considered by critics to be one of the chief preoccupations of Ionesco’s plays: “Twelve years ago, when I was in Brazil, someone asked me that and I said, ‘ask me it again in 10 or 20 years.’ Now, you ask me it again and I say, ‘I don’t understand it any better now.'”
On theater directors: “Very, very often in my career, I have felt that the directors didn’t understand me. One German director–and I must say most German directors are intellectual idiots–decided to begin my play Rhinoceros by having the characters sitting around a bunch of washing machines. I told him, ‘the way I wrote the play, they are sitting at tables in a bar.’ He said to me, ‘well, I decided on washing machines because I wanted to register my protest against the mechanization of modern society.'”
On the future: “My next play will include something a little different. I’ve been trying to incorporate the irrational language of dreams. It is rather difficult because we do not really understand dreams. I hope you will go see the play. I’m quite sure you won’t understand a thing.”