Eugene Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco , 1912-94, French playwright, b. Romania. Settling in France in 1938, he contributed to Cahiers du Sud and began writing avant-garde plays. His works stress the absurdity both of bourgeois values and of the way of life that they dictate. They express the futility of human endeavor in a universe ruled by chance. His play La Cantatrice chauve (1950; tr. The Bald Soprano, 1965) was suggested by the idiotic phrases in an English language textbook; it has become an enormously popular classic of the theater of the absurd. Among Ionesco's other plays are La Leçon (1951), Les Chaises (1952), Victimes du devoir (1953), Le Nouveau locataire (1957), Tueur sans gages (1958), Rhinocéros (1959), Photo du colonel (1967), Le roi se meurt (1963), and Jeux de massacre (1970). He wrote about the theater in Notes and Counternotes (1962, tr. 1964); a memoir, Present Past, Past Present (1968, tr. 1971); and the novel The Hermit (1974). His plays are all available in English translation.

Bibliography: See studies by L. C. Pronko (1965), R. N. Coe (rev. ed. 1971), A. Lewis (1972), and M. Lazar (1982).

Ionesco, Eugene (1912–94), playwright. The French‐Romanian playwright, an exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd, has been a favorite of Off‐Broadway companies and collegiate and regional theatres since the early 1950s. Among his better‐known works are The Lesson (1956), The Chairs (1958), and The Bald Soprano (1958). His only major commercial successes on Broadway were Rhinoceros (1961), although the remarkable performance of Zero Mostel was as much responsible for its popularity as was the excellence of the play, and a superb London production of The Chairs in 1998, which was a sellout during its limited engagement.