Play bill for The Bald Soprano

The Theater of the Absurd, though not a formal movement, was a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin to encompass the various European avant-garde playwrights of the late 1940s, ’50s and ’60s who dealt with similar themes, philosophies and means of representation. Behind this label is author Albert Camus’ meditation, in The Myth of Sisyphus, on a war-torn world rent of meaning: “A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.”

Eugène Ionesco was one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. He was born in Romania to a French mother and Romanian father; shortly after his birth, his parents moved the family to Paris. As a child, Ionesco was captivated by the puppet shows, known in French as ‘les Guignols’, staged in Paris’ parks. Yet, while the children around him laughed during these wacky and exaggerated performances, Ionesco remained silent, enraptured and entirety taken by the spectacle before him: “It was the spectacle of the world itself, which, unusual, improbably, but truer than truth, presented itself to me in an infinitely simplified and caricatured form, as if to underlie its grotesque and brutal truth.”

In an interview from 1961, he admitted the difficulty of defining ‘the absurd’; stating he would become “very angry with God” if he were to pursue such an end. However, in a 1957 essay on Kafka, echoing Camus’ sentiments from 15 years prior, Ionesco gave this interpretation: “Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose… Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.” Through Ionesco’s eyes, the world and existence are grotesque, absurd, ridiculous and painful; the absurd was not to be found inside existence, but that it was itself the very essence of life.

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Though consistently a man of literature and writing, Ionesco initially maintained a distance from the forum of theatre because of its objectifying nature. He saw actors  being dehumanized in their service of reenacting, indeed magnifying, the follies of humanity. The crude strings of theatre and the acting of the cast embarrassed him and it was by chance that he came into writing his first play, which wore the style of those childhood guignolades.

Ionesco was convinced the ‘truth’ of fiction was superior to that of reality and that society itself formed one of the barriers between human beings. In his theatrical pieces, he overemphasized commonplace actions in order to bring audiences back to the mysterious, the metaphysical entity whose absence he so lamented. He commented: “To feel the absurdity of the commonplace, and of language – its  falseness – is already to have gone beyond it. To go beyond it we must first of all bury ourselves in it. What is comical is the unusual in its pure state; nothing seems more surprising to me than that which is banal; the surreal is here, within grasp of our hands, in our everyday conversation.”

Most of the first half of his oeuvre took the form of short plays stemming from his belief that theatre needs “a very simple idea: a single obsession, a very clear self-evident development”. Over time and with the increasing popularity of his plays came a foray into the three-act structure. Overall, his works were a non-linear, non-local sum of vivid happenings and images, building to a degenerate Omega point of multiplicity. For Ionesco, this haphazard style better conveyed the sense of anxiety and disquietude inherent in the human condition than traditional plot development and language and dialogue ever could do on its own. With theatre, the mechanics of staging something were the only effective hurdle to the explicit transmission of an experience – the real vehicle of raw emotion and feeling.

This desire to connect with man’s vital drives and impulses – more precisely stated, his intuitions – stemmed from what had historically and contemporaneously taken over Western European society; a plague of conformity had resulted in the bourgeoisie’s total disconnect from the metaphysical, swaddled as they were in their material comforts. The dimension of mystery was lost to “the leveling of individuality, the acceptance of slogans by the masses, of ready-made ideas, which increasingly turn our mass societies into collections of centrally directed automata,” as Esslin suggests. If their entertainment, the theatre’s stage, could serve as a mouthpiece to shake their souls alive, Ionesco certainly saw to it that his in-your-face exaggerations and nonsensical dialogues would attempt this anti-heroic feat.

His first play, La Cantratice Chauvé (The Bald Soprano), originated from his observation of the dialogue from an English learning system’s course books, the Assimil method. Ionesco’s preoccupation with the theme of language and ‘true’ meaning had found here an absolute case-in-point. The banal conversation, repetition of truisms and clichés by the English couple in the lesson plans demonstrated for Ionesco the slippery nature of the subjectivity of language and semantics. In this tragicomedy, Ionesco’s “universal petty bourgeoisie” are removed from the raw emotions of life, conforming instead to accepted ideas and slogans, thoughtless opinions adopted along the lines of the status quo.

Billed as an ‘anti-play’, The Bald Soprano pushed theatre beyond the intermediary zone where structured plot and storyline were vehicles for commentary, into broken-down systems of incoherence where linearity and causation were cast aside in favour of revealing, via explicit visualizations, the very strings puppeteering life’s action. Self-referentiality sought to serve Ionesco’s goal of breaking through barriers of human communication by exposing the source of tragedy, comedy and, eventually, truth. The play had no definitive culmination and circled back into itself, ending where it had begun; a commentary on the indistinguishable nature of their rote lives.

The stronger the reactions (be they for or against his work) the better. Ionesco’s  was a very polar nature and the use of extremes – shock tactics, be they violent, nonsensical, absurd – were employed to reach past the surface level of consciousness, to turn everything on its head, force a new perception of reality; though offering no solutions as to what this new reality meant.

The direct result of his style was, however, effectively alienating. Often times, especially with early works, shows would be empty (enhancing their meaning a hundred-fold). Theatre-goers demanded their money back. At the outset of his career, ironically, Ionesco’s theory, bound in words of published commentary on his work, was more successful in passing on meaning than the plays themselves.

Aligned with this sense of a banal society were the a priori artistic movement of Dada and Surrealism. Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ sculpture series feels like a most obvious embodiment of the absurd parading as art; the most famous of which is the 1917 piece Fountain, a ‘found-art’ urinal turned on its side, mounted on a pedestal. We would indeed find that many of the motivations underlying the Theatre of the Absurd can be traced back to these post WWI and WWII art movements. As affective responses to the horrors of war, the spontaneous imaginative powers of the arbitrary unconscious stood at the centre of these new forms of ‘ordered’ creation.

Victims of Duty (performed by Scallabouche THEATRE Company)

With the play Victims of Duty, Ionesco has us delve into the subconscious, “the absolute void”, of the main character, Choubert, a petty bourgeois spending the evening quietly with his wife. A ‘pseudo-drama’, this play was amongst one of his most “significant statements, a play-wright’s play”. Though a ‘refined detective drama’, thrillers of investigations that are brought to the successful solving of a riddle, Victims of Duty lacks unity of character and any mentions of plot or motivation. With this, Ionesco again turns the very principles of the play inside out, onto itself, snaring the truth. We see this in the character of Nicolas d’Eu: he comes into the play mid-way as a replacement for the initial detective who’d instigated a search into the subconscious of Choubert. Nicolas’ character slightly parodies Ionesco’s own point of view when he questions the essential tasks and limitations of theatre.

In this play, he posits the studied achievements and ‘certainties’ of scientific research and human thought against the subconscious mind (a bottomless pit, a void of impulses, imaginations, unknowns). At the core of Ionesco’s philosophy are these stark polarities: all and nothingness, weight and weightlessness, certainty and complete chaos. With this structure, he seeks to reveal the absolute in the loss of it. This premise can be paralleled to “[the] profoundly mystical philosophy [of] Zen Buddhism [which] bases itself on the rejection of conceptual thinking: ‘The dying of reality is the asserting of it. And the asserting of emptiness is the denying of it.’”

One of his strongest commentaries on all and nothingness comes with The Chairs, Ionesco’s third staged play which was dubbed by him a ‘tragic farce’. Here we are met with an old couple seeking to host a gathering for ‘everyone’ (i.e. all of humanity). At this gathering, the husband intends to explain the meaning of existence as he knows it before his imminent death. The stage is crowded with an increasing number of chairs, all empty, and just before giving his speech, the old man jumps off the ivory tower of his residence. The empty chairs here seek to represent the absence of people, of God in the face of life’s explanation. Ionesco stated: “The theme of the play is nothingness… the invisible elements must be more and more clearly present more and more real (to give unreality to reality one must give reality to the unreal) until the point is reached when the unreal elements speak and move… and nothingness can be heard, is made concrete.”

In the 1953 play Amédée ou comment s’en débarrasser (Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It), Ionesco addresses his obsession with the idea that the proliferation and exponential accumulation of matter leads to the stifling of spirit. The main characters, a couple, Amédée and Madeleine, weave their sordid undoing around the centrifugal notion of the murder of love through possession, possessiveness. Their increasingly bitter resentment of one another is made explicit via some of Ionesco’s most vivid, haunting imagery. Off stage, in another room of the house, is a corpse which, though lifeless, continues to grow as a parasite would overtake its host. The dead body represents their love, murdered by the jealous Amédée, the hardened Madeleine, yet festering with each day they grow apart from each other.

Out of over 25 plays spanning his lifetime, the 1958 production of Tueur sans gages (The Killer) was one of his finest and among the major works of the Theatre of the Absurd. According to Esslin, there is a degree of “purity of style as well as language – at least in the original French” to be found in its conception. Certain little details accentuate and help to “conjure up Ionesco’s own peculiar world of nightmare, Chaplinesque humor, and wistful tenderness”.

In The Killer, we find the character of Bérenger who has discovered the utopic but bizarrely emptied “cité radieuse” (a radiant city). The ethereal feeling of lightness and joy Ionesco had felt as a child in the French countryside were inspiration for this imagined city’s spirit. Yet darkness lurks and terrorizing the reclusive citzens is a killer who lures his victims with the promise of freedom, thereafter committing murder by showing them a photo of a colonel. The killer symbolises the fleeting nature of Ionesco’s euphoric moment as a child, positioning the kernel (colonel?) of death, inevitable as it is, within the seed of life at its most idealised potential.

A scene from Rhinoceros (performed by Naqshineh Theatre)

The dawn of Ionesco as an internationally accepted and acclaimed playwright came with 1959’s Rhinocéros. The play was one of his boldest and sharpest critiques of the plague of conformity. Both the absurdity of blind conformity and the simplistic, reactive impulse to defiance are herein addressed. The play specifically underlines the perversion of such political ideologies as Fascism and Communism in society: “…in the course of my life I have been very much struck by what one might call the current of opinion, by its rapid evolution, its power of contagion, which is that of a real epidemic. People allow themselves suddenly to be invaded by a new religion, a doctrine, a fanaticism… At such moments we witness a veritable mental mutation… when people no longer share your opinions, when you can no longer make yourself understood by them, one has the impression of being confronted with monsters – rhinos, for example. They have that mixture of candor and ferocity. They would kill you with the best of consciences. And history has shown us during the last quarter of a century that people thus transformed not only resemble rhinos, but really become rhinoceroses.”

The Theatre of the Absurd embraces the dichotomy between unreality and reality, objectivity and subjectivity, vision and language, in an attempt to communicate truth, filter and transmit feeling. The ritualistic aspect inherent in performance art embodies a role similar to that of a religious congregation. In doing so, it speaks to that deep human need for longing and belonging, for overcoming blocks in rational communication by way of their disintegration and re-formulation into poetic harmony – tonal music of the soul to be ecstatically allowed inside. In this space, at once containing the audience while being contained by the audience, we may find a truth in staged reality – regardless of, indeed by way of, absolutely absurd situations.

Ultimately, all truths must be self-discovered truths. Ionesco strives to elucidate this by objectifying these subjectively obtained truths. In his usage of imagery and symbolic pataphor, a sort of tangibility results. We are allowed access to the unspeakable and hitherto unseen psychologies of our human character. These psychologies are brought alive by the irreplaceable vehicle of flesh-and-blood experience, painted as surrealist dreamscapes in vivid, visceral and parodied interactions, situations.

Having said all that, it would be absurd of me to assert that the overview I’ve just given of his works and theories should suffice. Reality and meaning are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one with out the other. Hopefully, I’ve done my part to transmit the meaning, or, at the very least, Ionesco’s intended meaning. Buoyed with this knowledge, go forth and experience its reality, its manifestation, as an audience member – the other side to theatre’s coin.

“Look at yourself with one eye, listen to yourself with the other.”

Improvisation

Mrs. Martin: What is the moral?

Firefighter: It’s up to you to find it.

The Bald Soprano

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