Eugene Ionesco (1909 – 1994)
Born Eugen Ionescu, was a French-Romanian playwright and dramatist, one of the foremost playwrights of Theatre of the Absurd.
None of us would have written as we do without surrealism and dadaism. By liberating the language, those movements paved the way for us.
Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.
It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.
The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well.
Ionesco believes that the irrational is man's intuitive form of vision. Everything that claims to be rational and realistic is a distortion of that vision, a shield raised against the absurdity of existence.