Often called the ‘Father of the Theatre of the Absurd', Eugene Ionesco was born on 26 November 1909, not 1912 as some sources have indicated, in Slatina, Romania. He was the son of Romanian lawyer, Eugen Ionescu, and Therese Ipcar, the daughter of a French engineer who had settled in Romania. Ionesco was deeply affected by his father in two ways. Firstly his father's treatment of his mother, divorcing her without her knowledge and obtaining custody of Ionesco and his sister, and secondly, his father's complete faith in the government, no matter who was in power at any given time. As a result Ionesco developed beliefs in direct opposition to those of his father, he became anti-government, anti-military, he questioned the existence of God and believed that women were often cruelly treated by men. These views heavily influenced his writing leading him to produce a plethora of written works including poetry, articles, dialogues and political diatribes.
Ionesco began his education in France, and then in 1925, after his father gained custody of him, he learnt Romanian and attended the college Sfantul Sava in Bucharest. Between 1929 and 1933 Ionesco studied for a French degree at the University of Bucharest and met Rodica Burileano, a student of philosophy and law, whom he married in 1936, the same year that his mother died.
Two years later he received a scholarship that enabled him to return to France and it was here that he decided to teach himself English. Ionesco was forty years old when he purchased a set of records produced by the Assimil conversation method and began to transcribe the short, simple exercises they contained. Amazed by the strangeness of these nonsensical sentences, Ionesco made them the basis of his first play, The Bald Soprano (1950) in which he rejected the traditional format of a play offering no logical plot or character development. Instead he created his own anarchic form of comedy to convey his existentialist view that modern man must assume ultimate responsibility for his acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad. He quickly wrote a number of plays, all further developing the anti-logical ideas of his first play. Two popular ones are The Lesson (1951) in which a timid professor uses words to gain tyrannical control over a young girl, and The Chairs (1952) about an elderly couple who await the arrival of an audience to hear the old man's last message to posterity, they gather chairs onto the stage before committing double suicide. However the orator who was hired to give the speech has aphasia and can only speak gibberish.
His plays, which are mainly in one act, seem to revolve around an awareness of binary opposites found in the world, for example; light and darkness, emptiness and too much presence, transparency and opacity, each taking a turn within Ionesco's text to have predominance over the other. Ionesco's plays also stress the impotence of language as a means of communication making his characters seem like robots under the control of an unseen manipulator. These tenets-- the difficulty of communication and the lack of absolutes in life and the absurdity of man's existence-- became the basis for Theatre of the Absurd.
Ionesco believed that to achieve freedom one must exist outside of history, therefore, in direct contrast to Brecht's Epic theatre theory, Ionesco felt that a theatre audience obtains freedom and enlightenment by existing outside the action of the play. Surrealism and Dadaism influenced Ionesco's work as well as writers such as Tzara, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Also, like Strindberg, many of Ionesco's ideas for his plays came from his dreams.
In his last years Ionesco abandoned writing and devoted himself to painting and exhibiting his works. He died in Paris on March 28, 1994.
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