Caricature without finesse: Ionesco's return to Broadway

Figure 1 Although the rich dramatic oeuvre of Eugène Ionesco, one of the greatest playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century, and the creator of a new tragic mode which I have called “metaphysical farce,” is constantly performed all over Europe, and even in Asia and the Middle East, he has not had a Broadway production for almost forty years. As to The Chairs, it was given its English-language premiere at London’s Royal Court, with Joan Plowright in the role of the Old Woman, and was eventually brought to the Phoenix Theatre in New York. One of the important questions to raise has to do with a strange neglect of Ionesco’s varied and significant body of work. There are no easy answers. Comparisons with Samuel Beckett, the other practitioner of philosophical tragicomedy are unavoidable. Since he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Beckett’s name has become an icon for avant-garde literature. Of course Beckett did write in English and he was also the self-translator of the texts he first composed in French.

A Romanian Frenchman (born of a French mother and a Romanian father), Ionesco is less easy to pinpoint for a Western European, or an American, intellectual, than an Irish writer. However, both writers have suffered from being considered perversely obscure, elitist, and above all avant-garde. Unlike Beckett, who almost never granted an interview, nor deigned comment on his work, Ionesco sought questions from critics and journalists, and accepted readily to speak at university symposia. In 1962, Gallimard published his book of theoretical essays Notes and Counter Notes. These brilliantly argued talks, essays, interviews are immensely helpful in showing the misconceptions attached to the term “avant-garde.”

In the course of the inaugural talk delivered at “The Helsinki Debates on the Avant-garde Theatre” (June 1959), Ionesco declared: “A work of art and a dramatic work also must be a primary instinct . . . which owes nothing to anything but itself.” And, in a 1958 essay published by Arts,the enfant terriblethat Ionesco enjoyed being challenged his readers by stating: “the avant-garde is . . . revolutionary” and thus has been and still is, “like most revolutionary movements, a turning back, a reappraisal.” Thus, according to Ionesco, Beckett’s Endgame, “a so-called avant-garde play, is far closer to the lamentations of Job, the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare, than to the tawdry boulevard drama.”

Ionesco’s masterpiece of his first playwriting period is The Chairs(1952), a tragic farce wherein the real and the imaginary coincide within a semi-circle of swiftly proliferating chairs, seats for imaginary guests visiting a nonagenarian couple, guardians or concierges of an isolated lighthouse rising upon a bare rock. Thus, the play suggests absence by means of the disquieting clutter of empty chairs. Such is the essence of the first metaphysical farce composed in the second half of our century. In a letter to the first director of The Chairs, Ionesco suggests: “Give yourself up to the play, I beg you. Do not minimize its effects, whether it be the large number of chairs, the large number of bells that announce the arrival of the invisible guests or the lamentations of the Old Woman, who should be like a mourner in Corsica or Jerusalem; everything should be exaggerated, excessive, painful, childish, a caricature, without finesse.” Ionesco wants to achieve the impossible: to show absence, vacuity, the ontological void.

Simon McBurney doubled the number of chairs, often dragged in three or four at a time by the Old Woman (Geraldine McEwan), and by her understudy who could be her double (Sarah Baxter). The reason for doubling the Old Woman (the two of them are never seen simultaneously) is the vast stage of the Broadway theatre. Only at curtain call time do we realize that two Old Women were filling the stage with...