SEASON 2024–2025
All Eugène Ionesco.
Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994) was born in Slatina, Romania, to a Romanian father and a French mother, and spent his childhood shuttling between the two countries before settling permanently in France as an adult. In Romania during the 1930s he watched friends and colleagues fall, one by one, into the mass hysteria of fascism — an experience that would surface, transformed, in his most famous play decades later.
Ionesco became one of the founding figures of the Theatre of the Absurd, alongside Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. His breakthrough, The Bald Soprano, grew out of the stilted, meaningless dialogue in an English-language phrasebook he was using to learn the language; struck by how empty the "lessons" in polite conversation sounded, he turned them into what he called an "anti-play." The style that followed became his signature: language that collapses into nonsense, objects that multiply until they crowd out the people on stage, and a creeping, absurd logic that feels, somehow, entirely true.
His 1959 play Rhinoceros — in which the residents of a small town transform, one after another, into rhinoceroses — stands as one of the theatre's great allegories of conformism and totalitarianism, drawn directly from what he had witnessed in his youth. Ionesco was elected to the Académie française in 1970 and remains one of the most widely produced and translated playwrights of the twentieth century.
This season brings together three landmark works spanning his career: The Bald Soprano, the "anti-play" that started it all; Rhinoceros, his most enduring allegory; and The Chairs, his haunting meditation on emptiness and the guests who never arrive.
Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994) was born in Slatina, Romania, to a Romanian father and a French mother, and spent his childhood shuttling between the two countries before settling permanently in France as an adult. In Romania during the 1930s he watched friends and colleagues fall, one by one, into the mass hysteria of fascism — an experience that would surface, transformed, in his most famous play decades later.
Ionesco became one of the founding figures of the Theatre of the Absurd, alongside Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. His breakthrough, The Bald Soprano, grew out of the stilted, meaningless dialogue in an English-language phrasebook he was using to learn the language; struck by how empty the "lessons" in polite conversation sounded, he turned them into what he called an "anti-play." The style that followed became his signature: language that collapses into nonsense, objects that multiply until they crowd out the people on stage, and a creeping, absurd logic that feels, somehow, entirely true.
His 1959 play Rhinoceros — in which the residents of a small town transform, one after another, into rhinoceroses — stands as one of the theatre's great allegories of conformism and totalitarianism, drawn directly from what he had witnessed in his youth. Ionesco was elected to the Académie française in 1970 and remains one of the most widely produced and translated playwrights of the twentieth century.
This season brings together three landmark works spanning his career: The Bald Soprano, the "anti-play" that started it all; Rhinoceros, his most enduring allegory; and The Chairs, his haunting meditation on emptiness and the guests who never arrive.