Eugene Ionesco
THEATERS OF THE ABSURD
Why is there still theater today? Because it is alive . The
people speak; they are not speaking images. We are talking about a
theater which a number of us wrote, especially between 1950 and
1965. The difference between theater and cinematic images: text,
words, not pure production, not spectacle. The theater most of all is
text and not production-spectacle alone . Why does one go to a foot–
ball game, to a prize fight? To see actual people, to see the blood
flow-alas-the punch up close, right here, in close participation.
Why do we go to visit temples and are not content to see them on
postcards? To be there, to live in the spiritual company of our
forefathers.
The theater is alive; one can go to see a play twice; it will be
like two plays, each time another way of being, another game. The
movie image is stiff, cold. What does the theater serve? What does
football serve, unless, when one is English, to kill the Belgians?
"The theater of the absurd" names a certain number of
theatrical works whose center of origin and creation was the Paris of
the early 1950s. This theater was described as such by the well–
known English critic Martin Esslin. Why did he call it "the theater of
the absurd"? Maybe because one spoke a great deal of the absurd
between 1945 and 1950, and Esslin had to consider that there was a
rapport between our theater and thought, theories or obsessions
made fashionable by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Georges
Bataille, and a few others. It seemed to him that there was a rapport
between this genre of theater and the way these writers saw the
postwar world. Maybe he was right. As far as I'm concerned, I have
had a certain amount of trouble accepting this definition. But now it
has come to be called a certain genre of theater, and that definition
applies to theatrical works in the current era. Since the definition
and the theater belong to literary history, this has given me a reason
to call the theater of the absurd "absurd." I would rather, like Em–
manuel Jacquard, have called it "theater of derision." In effect, the
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as a talk given at the First New York
International Festival of the Arts at Columbia University, on June 15, 1988.
