EUGENE IONESCO
49
preoccupying themselves with the only important thing: the possible
end of this world. But let us try to uplift ourselves at least by think–
ing about what is rot-proof, about the real, that is to say about the
sacred, and about the ritual that expresses the sacred and cannot be
found without the creation of great art.
I absolutely don't know whether the theater of the absurd has a
future or not , whether the different realist theaters have a future or
not. I can probably respond to this question by interrogating my
fortune-teller. But those who ask about the vitality of this theater of
the absurd are the enemies of the theater of the absurd and the par–
tisans of one sort of political realism or another. There always will be
one theater of the absurd or another , other numerous forms of the
absurd - unless one were to find, tomorrow or the day after tomor–
row, the key to the enigma.
Yet I think that in part all this preceding discourse is super–
fluous. I wanted to talk about the battles , the polemics we had dur–
ing that period with certain active and virulent Brechtians, among
them Kenneth Tynan. The texts of these polemics are historical . But
the ideologies , we all know, are passe. The pure spectacles, the pro–
ductions , provisionally replace them. Furthermore, the absurd has
invaded the real in such a fashion that what one calls "realist reality,"
the reality of realities and realisms, to us seems as real as the absurd;
and the absurd appears to us as reality: let's look around us .
The incontestable Beckett, who came to the theater in 1953,
with his admirable
Waiting
fOT
Codot,
is not simply an author of the
so-called absurd drama because he is as much an absurdist as he is a
realist. Beckett has brought us to the edge ofthe absurd in his drama
and in his comedy which have become routine.
It
has surpassed the
limits that go to the absurd and beyond, beyond the reality we now
have reached .
Translated from the French
by
Edith Kurzweil
