Deadly projectiles explode around the couple, but these projectiles change into ludicrous objects—broken cups, fragments of pipes, doll heads—as the hostile partners briefly remember their past and attempt to communicate. When inner life is restored, the internal war ceases and harmony might have a chance in the life of the couple, as well as in the city.

The eruption of strange elements in a banal setting is rarely as clear as it is in Frenzy for Two or More. It is nevertheless frequent in Ionesco’s work: The clock in the Smiths’ living room strikes seventeen times as Mrs. Smith announces that it is nine o’clock, Jack’s fiancée has three noses, and a corpse expands in Amédée’s bedroom while mushrooms grow in his living room. Sometimes, the effect is intensified by the proliferation of the objects: a young couple produces hundreds of eggs in The Future Is in Eggs; dozens of cups are piled up in Victims of Duty; a multitude of rhinoceroses invade a town in Rhinoceros; and pieces of furniture fill an apartment, a building, a street, and the entire city in Le Nouveau Locataire (pr. 1955, pb. 1958; The New Tenant, 1956). There is some logic in the last example, since an apartment is being furnished. This logic, however, is eliminated by the proportions of the event—the city is paralyzed. Ionesco applies the same mechanism when he creates the accumulation of chairs in The Chairs or the multiplication of murders in The Killer.

The protagonists that produce eggs or carry chairs are led by internal forces, which they ignore and therefore cannot control. They behave like automatons. Ionesco has many ways of making puppets out of his characters. Their mechanical language and the proliferation of objects in their hands, or around them, are two of these methods; others are caricature and distancing. The old woman who raises her petticoats in the hope of looking sexy in The Chairs, and the king responsible for countless massacres who cries like a child in Exit the King are examples of caricatures. In Victims of Duty, Ionesco’s first clearly introspective play, Choubert’s descent into himself is presented as a show within the show, thus reducing the impact of the undertaking.

In Ionesco’s theater, topics are serious, such as the ideological takeover of a town, or death, but they are treated lightly. Language and action, pushed to extremes, deprive the protagonists of a full credibility and plunge them into the absurd, yet they remain tragic in their human implications.

The Bald Soprano

First produced: La Cantatrice chauve, 1950 (first published, 1954; English translation, 1956)

Type of work: Play

An English couple engages in small talk during an evening at home. They are visited by another couple and the Fire Chief.

The title of a play usually permits one to anticipate its content. However, in The Bald Soprano, nobody sings and no head is bald. In most plays, words are chosen to make the strongest possible impact. In The Bald Soprano, language flows independently from meaning. A play has a plot and at times subplots. The Bald Soprano does not. It is subtitled an “anti-play,” and that is true.

The scene is the English living room of an English couple, the Smiths. Mr. Smith reads the newspaper. Mrs. Smith comments on the dinner they just had, as if her husband had not been there; she praises yogurt, which is good for the stomach, “appendicitis, and apotheosis.” Mr. Smith remarks that a good doctor must die with his patient. He announces the death of Bobby Watson; the same name, repeated thirty times, is applied to all the members of Bobby’s extended family.

The rest of the play is in keeping with this introductory segment. Mary, the maid, introduces the Martins. A long conversation, punctuated by “What a coincidence!,” permits the Martins to deduce that the Smiths are husband and wife. The doorbell rings three times. Nobody is there when Mrs. Smith opens the door. She concludes that every time the doorbell rings, there is nobody there. When Mr. Smith opens the door, the Fire Chief enters; he is in search of fires to extinguish. Various fables are told. Ambiguous statements about fire are made, while Mary throws herself on the Fire Chief. Clichés and false proverbs accumulate at an increasing pace, until the characters scream onomatopoeic words at each other. The noise stops; the lights turn off. When they come back on, the Martins are seated like the Smiths were in the first scene; they repeat the same sentences. The curtain falls.

The absurd language of the play was inspired years earlier, when Ionesco was in Romania and read the self-taught lessons in an English manual in which, for example, one learns the use of prepositions by discovering that the ceiling is above, the walls around, and the floor under. Such sentences stimulated Ionesco’s creativity. The title of the play was determined by chance. During a rehearsal, an actor erroneously replaced the banal expression “the blond teacher” contained in the script with the unexpected “the bald soprano.” The error fit well with Ionesco’s intentions and he adopted it; it fit so well, in fact, that the bald soprano, absent from the first play, appears as a singing bald English girl in A Stroll in the Air, the other play that Ionesco situated in England.

The surprise of the audience who attended the first performances of The Bald Soprano is understandable. Since then, however, the play has become the prototype of what was later called the Theater of the Absurd. It is the striking integration of the techniques that Ionesco discovered in surrealist poetry, with his own vision of literature.

The Chairs

First produced: Les Chaises, 1952 (first published, 1954; English translation, 1958)

Type of work: Play

An old couple prepares to deliver a message for posterity. The numerous chairs they bring to the stage to accommodate the audience remain empty.

The Chairs is a one-act tragic farce. A ninety-five-year-old man and his ninety-four-year-old wife live isolated on an island. They interminably reminisce, joke, and quarrel. He plans to share his life experience with posterity and has invited a large audience to hear the orator who will speak on his behalf. It would be touching if their dialogue were meaningful, but disconnected from reality, past or present, it often derails into a mechanical blurb.

The doorbell rings, and the old man hobbles to the door. He welcomes the first guest, but the Lady is invisible. The old people are excitingly talking to no one; the chair they offer to the visitor remains empty. The episode repeats itself again and again, with the old couple bringing chairs from the wings faster and faster. This multiplication of chairs is a theatrical miracle—the striking image of void. It culminates with the invisible Emperor’s arrival. The orator, who is a real body, is ready to speak. He reaches the dais and salutes the invisible crowd. The old woman sobs, her husband trembles with emotion; they shout “Long live the Emperor,” and throw themselves out of two symmetrical windows. The orator, who has remained impassive during the double suicide, coughs, groans, and utters his message—a few guttural sounds. The expected speech is as void as the chairs.

The Chairs portrays the loneliness of the elderly. Their situation borders on tragic. They have no descendent, and the offspring that the woman describes is too perfect to be true. As for the man, the apotheosis that he wants is so inflated that it can only blow up. Their conduct neutralizes the empathy they could inspire. The man is ridiculously dependent on his wife; the woman shamefully tries to be sexy. They appear to be close at first, but when the visitors arrive they go their own way, tell contradictory stories, or even lies, and flirt with the guests. Their marriage is an appearance. It is at the same moment, but separately, that they plunge to their deaths.

Ionesco progressively makes puppets out of them. He places in their mouths a language so meaningless that, in extreme cases, it is a verbal flight in which words are associated by sound rather than by meaning. The frantic and shaky transportation of chairs becomes as mechanical as the couple’s language. It is a proliferation of objects without a purpose, the same concept that Ionesco used for the accumulation of eggs in The Future Is in Eggs. Ionesco’s puppets, however, recover some dignity as representatives of the human condition. In the face of death, human activities become irrelevant. Ionesco’s tragic farce is a superb expression of the insignificance of life.

Rhinoceros

First produced: 1959 as Die Nashörner, 1960 as Rhinocéros (first published, 1959, as Rhinocéros; English translation, 1959)

Type of work: Play

A rhinoceros charges through a peaceful town. Soon most residents are attracted by the appeal of bestiality and change into rhinoceroses. Only Bérenger refuses to capitulate.

The play begins as Bérenger and other patrons are having a drink at an outdoor café. A rhinoceros charges down the street. The characters remark about this strange incident, but soon the initial surprise wears off. The same reaction is repeated when another animal gallops through the street from the opposite direction.

Act 2 begins in the office where Bérenger works. His colleagues are discussing the newspaper account of the animal incident. Mrs. Boeuf rushes in and announces that a rhinoceros has chased her and realizes that it is Mr. Boeuf transformed. Bérenger then visits his friend John, who defends the rhinoceroses, eventually turns into one, and attempts to run Bérenger down.

In act 3, Dudard, one of Bérenger’s colleagues, explains the motives of the rhinoceroses, making it sound like Bérenger, who does not share his views, is abnormal. Daisy, Bérenger’s girlfriend, informs him that Botard, who had supported Bérenger’s views, has joined the animals’ ranks. Bérenger receives only excuses and protests when he rallies the others against the bestiality that has overcome the town. Daisy herself fails to hear him; she gives in to the attraction of the herd and leaves the stage to metamorphose. Bérenger misses the force that belonging to a community provides, but he stands his ground, alone and miserable, in his humanity.

A few elements of fantasy appear in the play; for example, Mr. “Boeuf” means Mr. “Ox,” and Jean plays an illusionist. However, the play is simple, even traditional, in its structure. This simplicity gives more force to the disturbing presence of beasts in an urban environment. The metamorphosis of the residents reminds one of Franz Kafka’s short story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936). However, where Kafka’s giant bug causes repulsion, Ionesco’s “rhinoceritis” is seductive. The rhinoceroses’ trumpeting is perceived as music, and they are said to be as beautiful as gods.

The play represents the mindless following of others in order to be like the herd; the same appearance, the same aspirations, the same thoughts, overtake the community and provide to each individual a cozy sense of closeness. Ionesco was inspired to write Rhinoceros by the rise of fascism in Romania in the late 1930’s, but he purposely refused to give a name to his herd. The play applies to fascism, Stalinism, and all the other political or religious doctrines that justify arbitrary violence in the name of an ideal. The French intelligentsia, who at the time inclined to the Left, highly approved of Rhinoceros. Its author was invited into their circle, but Ionesco, then and later, refused any affiliation.

The rhinoceros, enormous and seductive because of its might, blindly charging down a street, trampling kittens, destroying staircases and piercing walls, is a powerful symbol of the danger of ideologies when they turn into fanaticism. It is still a valid symbol in the twenty-first century, whether it applies to the relatively harmless dictatorship of fashion, the excesses of well-intentioned religious groups, the tyranny of political leaders, or the horrors of terrorism.

Exit the King

First produced: Le Roi se meurt, 1962 (first published, 1963; English translation, 1963)

Type of work: Play

This play is the simplest and most explicit of Ionesco’s works. It portrays the slow acceptance of death by King Bérenger the First.

Exit the King is one long, uninterrupted scene. The kingdom has been deteriorating for some time: the heater does not work, the cows do not produce milk, and the sun is late. Queen Marguerite and the Doctor understand what is coming. They believe that they must inform the King and help him prepare for death. Queen Marie, the King’s second and dearest wife, wants to protect him from the truth. Encouraged by Marie, Bérenger first denies that his death is imminent, but he must progressively face the evidence. The physician coldly presents the medical facts.

Marguerite expects the King to live his death as a “ceremony.” Marie comforts and cajoles him. In a progression as precise as the various stages described by modern physicians who study the process of dying, Bérenger denies the possibility of his demise, rebels, bargains, despairs, and finally resigns himself to it. As he weakens and loses control, his entourage vanishes. Only Queen Marguerite remains at his side. Bérenger has ceased his struggle. He looks inside; he is relieved of the metaphorical weights he carried through life. One limb, one finger at a time, he gives himself up to the Divinity of Death represented by Marguerite. She disappears, leaving the King on his throne, as still as a statue. The scenery fades away, a gray light invades the stage, and everything vanishes in a sort of mist.

Why choose a king to describe the dying process? Because to be born and to live is to take possession of the world. To die is to lose that grip, just as Bérenger witnesses the disappearance of his entourage, his kingdom, and everything else. The secondary reason is a traditional one: Being a king enlarges the character and gives him the nobility of a new King Lear. At times, Bérenger concentrates in himself the entire history of humanity; he invented fire as well as atomic fission. At other times, he is the universe itself, the light and the clouds, as if Ionesco were prophesying the end of the world.

In Ionesco’s theater, tragedy and comedy are inseparable. His tragic hero is also a mediocre bourgeois who forgets to wear his slippers. He is even a sadistic and cowardly puppet in the tradition that produced Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (wr. 1888, pr., pb. 1896; English translation, 1951). Some scenes in which Bérenger is pulled between the contradictory commands of his entourage are performed in a slapstick style. Frequent references are made to the fact that the King’s death is the subject of a play that will end shortly. These references function on two levels. From a tragic perspective, they remind the audience that the process leading to death is inexorable. In a comic perspective, they say that, in this case at least, it will only be the end of a puppet show.