Eugène Ionesco

Journalist

So it's Ionesco.

Eugène Ionesco

Hello Nicolas. How are you?

Journalist

Hello Odette, how are you? Well, yes, it's Ionesco.

Journalist

You've just heard a scene from his first play, "The Bald Soprano".

Journalist

In the month of May, in 1950, it was performed for the first time at the Noctambule theatre, a small theatre on the left bank. 10 years later, Eugène Ionesco is now recognised. His works have been translated into every language. In Paris, he is listed alongside Claudel, Anouilh, Marivaux and Shakespeare in the French theatre repertoire thanks to Jean-Louis Barrault. Here, at his disposal, the general public, the great theatres and the big stage production displays.

Jean-Louis Barrault

There. My children, I thank you. Now, all I have left to do is to put the Hun. Put the Hun and see you tonight. Thanks again.

Journalist

For some, Eugène Ionesco, the author of Rhinoceros is the modern-day Aristophanes. For others, he's just a cabaret singer who read Kafka. But a creator isn't responsible for the literature that is derived from his works. Ionesco, who has never, until now, explained himself in front of viewers, is going to tell us himself where he comes from. Eugène Ionesco, where does your name come from?

Eugène Ionesco

My name is Ionesco, like my father. Ionesco means Son of Jean. My father was Roumanian. This name is very common in Romania, like the Danish Jansens or the English Johnsons. Ionesco is Martin, Dupont and Durant united.

Journalist

But you have a very deep French cultural background?

Eugène Ionesco

Yes, I'm a French citizen. I came to France at the age of one, I then left when I was 13 1/2 years old to return to my father's home. I therefore spent the first years, the first years of my life in France. My childhood was French.

Journalist

And at 13 1/2, you went back to Romania for several years?

Eugène Ionesco

Yes. I stayed there until I was 26. I learned Romanian. I finished secondary school and my university education. At 24, I became a French teacher in a Bucharest secondary school. I was a teacher for two years. And in 1938, at the age of 26, I came back to Paris. I got a scholarship to do a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, a thesis that was neither finished nor started. But I always had a penchant for literature. I always wrote, as they say, poems inspired at the same time by Francis Jammes and Maeterlinck, critical essays, the beginnings of novels and so on and so forth. Other than that, I wrote a play that's called "The Bald Soprano", just to make my friends laugh, and I read it to friends. The friends laughed. So I said to myself that I could perhaps use this play and have it played in part or in its entirety in cabarets to increase my income. But I saw absolutely no importance in my theatrical activities. I dreamt about novels, and essays.

Journalist

You have become, in some ways, an author of plays, in spite of yourself?

Eugène Ionesco

I am a playwright in spite of myself.

Journalist

And after 10 years, do you think that you do plays that are groundbreaking or that your work, taken as a whole, is more in line with traditional theatre?

Eugène Ionesco

Well, I'm a bit of a prisoner of what's been said about me. It's been said that my plays are groundbreaking so I have also said that they were groundbreaking plays. And when I looked carefully, I concluded that they could be groundbreaking plays.

Journalist

In your works, the world is absurd like in Alfred Jary's work, and man is all alone there as in Kafka's work. Is this your philosophy of life?

Eugène Ionesco

I don't know. It's very hard to define the word absurd. In my opinion, the world isn't absurd in itself. Everything is logical. For example, they say that the death of Camus was absurd. It wasn't absurd at all. A car lost control, there was a tree, the car crashed itself against the tree. It's quite logical and can be explained. But what seems absurd, is existing, it's existence in itself that seems to me to not be absurd, but incredible, incomprehensible, astounding. Now, of course, there are things that don't come from the core of existence. In this sense, we can say that they're absurd. But in the sense that I say that something is absurd, it means that absurdity doesn't reign. First of all, it doesn't reign inside of myself. What right do I have to say that something is absurd if I didn't have, inside of me, the interior model of that which is not absurd? And in terms of solitude, I think that we are together and alone at the same time. But I think that when we're together, very often, we're alone. And I think that it's deep within my intense solitude that I find others and that there is the possibility for communion. In my fundamental anguish, in my fear of death, in my love, I find death, the fear of death and the ability to love any human from any time period. And, for me, what seems fundamental and extremely important, is to not emphasize the differences but rather what identifies people between each other.

Journalist

In any case, most of your plays describe a human world that is a world of nightmares. No doubt you're doing this while thinking about a better world? What is the world that you dream about?

Eugène Ionesco

I don't do... I only have nightmares these days. And it's not my fault if I only have nightmares. We just have to look around and we truly see that the world is nightmare-like. But if I denounce it as a nightmare, it's because it's possible for the nightmare to disappear.