It is good to know that a rainy afternoon in Paris can still be enlivened by exposure to the world of Ionesco at the pocket-sized Théâtre de la Huchette. La Cantatrice chauve has been running there uninterruptedly since 1957, clocking up those eminently forgettable statistics, familiar from The Mousetrap—this many changes of cast, this many thousand performances, this many costumes, vases, antimacassars…. Still crazy after all these years, the Smiths chunter on in their amiably sinister way, the Martins play out theatre's sexiest recognition scene, the fire-chief, hit by recession, hustles door to door for even the teeny-weeniest conflagration, while the maid, who has clearly foresuffered all, keeps a forensic eye on the proceedings, knowing it will probably end as usual with all parties barking of birth, copulation and death. As one staggers out in the quest of liquid refreshment, it is odd to recall that the man responsible for these avant-garde shenanigans has become a pillar of the establishment, who proudly sports a French Academician's sword and regalia, has his plays performed at the Comédie Française, and has now been consecrated by incorporation in the Pléiade collection alongside Molière and Claudel.

Although tempting, it would be misleading to plot Ionesco's career as a course from young turk to old buffer. A quadragenarian in the decade where he contributed, less absent-mindedly than Samuel Beckett, to one of the greatest upheavals in theatre history, the author of La Cantatrice chauve, first performed in 1950, was by then a survivor with a complex personal history already imprinted in the lugubrious eyes, the way with a bottle and the somewhat frantic temperament which, for the fellow dramatist and névrosé Arthur Adamov, gave him the air of a "bébé fou". Born in Bucharest in 1909, transplanted to France at the age of two, Ionesco was brought up speaking French while his overbearing Romanian father beavered away at his law exams, paying scant attention to the impoverished family. Surprisingly, in circumstances that remain mysterious despite Emmanuel Jacquart's probings, Ionesco returned at the age of thirteen to Romania, whither his father had decamped some time earlier, divorcing his French wife on a trumped-up pretext and marrying a woman who, it seems, could scarcely bear to be in the same room as him and was in turn duly loathed by her stepson.

Between 1922 and 1938, Ionesco learnt to be a Romanian, playing the part so well that by the age of twenty-nine he was a prominent figure on the literary scene, well known for his poems and iconoclastic critical essays. But as the sound of jackboots grew uncomfortably loud, he found it expedient to sign up for a Sorbonne doctorate (quickly abandoned) on "Sin and Death in French Poetry since Baudelaire", and by the outbreak of war he was in Paris with his young wife, learning once more to be an alien.

The universe of Ionesco's early one-act plays and sketches is at once domestic and linguistic. It is in the couple's drawing-room, the family home, the scholar's den, the old folk's abode, the bachelor pad that talk ceases to be merely the currency of human exchange or the barometer of psychological truth and, shoving aside identity, communication and motive, becomes a perilous and disquieting zone. But language here is double. Allowed to proliferate at the expense of sense, words replace thought, scouring out the inner life and leaving their victims prey to the merely atavistic, or else, as in La Leçon, subject to a lethal coercion the more frightening for being clearly beyond the control of those ostensibly in charge.

Yet for Ionesco, words can also be the harbingers of wonder. Freed of its craven subordination to logic, language can become a playground; ride the surf of words, Ionesco suggests, and you may experience the euphoric release which attends the fundamental experience (recollected from childhood at La Chapelle-Anthenaise) he calls évanescence. While the old man in Les Chaises clings doggedly to the idea that he has a message for humanity, he is beset only by the void, manifested unforgettably by the rows of empty chairs. More sagacious, his wife Sémiramis urges him to make up his own world in his head, to make himself a nest in words relieved of their impossible mission to anchor down a stable reality. The doubleness of language is especially patent in Jacques ou la soumission, where it is the mind-numbing idiolect of the family group which exacts Jacques's submission to bourgeois conventions, but where, equally, it is a ludic and childlike manipulation of words (notably the word chat), a revelling in the free play of the signifier, which provides him and Roberte with their escape route into a private world of freedom and fantasy.

Ionesco's early plays work best when waves of psychic disquiet with which they are imbued (and whose autobiographical basis is progressively disclosed in works such as Journal en miettes, 1967), are transmitted not simply by mean of oneiric atmosphere but via concrete stage images. Where Beckett's is a world of progressive deprivation, Ionesco is the poet of proliferation: more and more chairs, more cups and saucers, more briefcases, more rhinoceroses. In Le nouveau locataire, the tenant, deaf to the landlady's prattle, fusses over the exact disposition of his furniture, but is only satisfied when, as more and more desks and chairs and sideboards are piled insanely on top of each other, he cocoons himself in the last empty corner and politely asks for the light to be extinguished. Apart from the visual image, the key here is the build-up, the sure sense of theatrical rhythm, the feeling for ritual (the same performance every night) and an idiom which, however paroxysmic, remains rooted in comedy, a mode Ionesco finds harsher, less forgiving than tragedy.

Stung by the accusation (levelled by Kenneth Tynan among others) that his plays were irrelevant, Ionesco eschewed Beckettian silence and lambasted his critics for their ideological blindness—the age's great malady, as he has never stopped insisting. But he also changed his act. The more elaborate plays of his middle period, centred on the Everyman figure of Bérenger, have as their main theme the opposition between various forms of false consciousness and the acute sense of the human condition available only to the solitary individual. If Bérenger alone (in Tueur sans gages) tries to fight the killer who lurks in the radiant city, it is not because he is better or smarter than others but because his lack of social standing immunizes him against the terrible indifference of the crowd. Similarly, in Rhinocéros (1960), it is not the power to resist which prevents Bérenger from joining the stampede to become a rhinoceros but a radical naiveté, a lack of "side", which simply won't allow him to ditch his humanity even when he wants to.

Rhinocéros, graced by Barrault and Olivier in the part of Berenger, was an international success, and so, after the inane Le Piéton de l'air, was the last play of the cycle, Le Roi se meurt (1962), where King Bérenger gives moving testimony to what was by now emerging as his creator's central obsession, the absurdist's absurdity, the fact of death itself. These more substantial and accessible plays made Ionesco acceptable to a wider theatre-going public, but it took all the craft of skilled directors to bring off what the playwright called "la projection sur scène du monde de dedans", to make something manageable out of a "matière théâtrale" dredged up from "mes rêves, mes angoisses, mes désirs obscurs, mes contradictions intérieures …". If part of Ionesco's charm continued to lie in the brightly lit, weightless French (closer to Tintin and Astérix than to Racine or Giraudoux) in which his characters conversed, he was all too ready to provide it in vast quantities, encrusting his dramatic structures with a cladding his cannier directors found it necessary to thin out.

It is a pity in this regard that Jacquart's generally scrupulous and comprehensive edition [Théâtre complet] provides only the final performed version of the texts even when earlier ones are extant. In its original version (still the one most generally available), Tueur sans gages comprised vast tracts of material which held up the action disastrously but cast interesting light on Ionesco's strengths and limitations, and it would be interesting to view this alongside the "version pour la scène". Jacquart, it must be said, makes ample amends by including very interesting production notes commissioned from some of Ionesco's most distinguished directors—Barrault, Lavelli, Serrault, Mauclair, Planchon—and by providing stage photographs, many of them featuring Ionesco regulars (such as Tsilla Chelton, latterly a hit as the outrageous old lady in the film Tatie Danielle), about whom much useful information is given.

La Soif et la faim, staged by Jean-Marie Serrault at the Comédie Française in 1966, marked a second major turning-point. From then on, Ionesco does not so much write plays as supply compliant producers with the latest fragmentary bulletins from the inner theatre of his memories, dreams and fantasies, often already recorded in his diaries (Passé présent, présent passé, 1968). Spiritual autobiography becomes the predominant mode of his theatre, the quest its principal motif, and the discontinuous series of tableaux its staple device (Ionesco in this last respect falls in with the dominant dramaturgical trends of the period). At its least successful, as in Ce formidable bordel! (1973) or L'Homme aux valises (1975), the results can be fairly dire—on both page and stage. Unlike his friend and compatriot Mircea Eliade, Ionesco has little flair for comparative religion, and the eclectic myths and symbols in which he clads his personal search for tranquillity often have a woefully superannuated air. Things liven up when he resumes the struggle with his doughtiest antagonist—death. Jeux de massacre (1970), and to a lesser extent Macbett (1972), Ionesco's grand guignol version of Shakespeare, convey something of the old mayhem. Gross and frenetic, the tableaux of Jeux de Massacre involve a wide range of settings—prison, hospital, town hall—and characters of all ages and types who have one thing in common: by the end of the scene in which they appear, they will have been mown down by the plague which stalks the town in the shape of a hooded monk.

Just as deathly but twice as weird is Voyages chez les morts (1981), adapted by Roger Planchon at Villeurbanne in 1983 under the title Spectacle Ionesco. The denizens of Death City turn out to be mostly long-gone members of the Ionesco family circle, including his mother, father and stepfather, and the author seemingly wants us to witness his attempts to square things with them once and for all. If it looks as if this was destined to be his last play, it is good to see from Jacquart's chronology that the play-wright has kept busy in the past decade, travelling, painting and searching for peace. He deserves it: warts and all, Ionesco is to be cherished, not least because the "bébé fou" still lurks beneath the academician's uniform.