Word: ionesco
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...Ionesco makes no mention of his playwriting in Present Past Past Present. In several passages he uses his symbol of the rhinoceros for those insensitive conformists, the 'New Men', who are the ogres of Ionesco's imagination, but never does he refer to the play Rhinoceros which was his first commercial success. Except for a smattering of italicized comments sprinkled throughout the text Present Past was written before Ionesco wrote his first play. The Bald Soprano, at the age of thirty-seven. Ionesco writes of his youth in Rumania and Paris, his father's desertion of his mother, the horrors...
Soon after writing this declaration lonesco began what became his great life work. Present Past Past Present is the unattractive side of Ionesco's genius. His hate for the totalitarians of left and right, his loathing of fad and cliche, his nearly total despair, are monotonously gone into. Even his sentences are depressed. There is no humor and little hope. Perhaps the content of his plays is nearly as disillusioned. But in them his inability to make sense out of the world becomes scenes of brilliant nonsense. He turns the types of people he hates into grotesques and their cliches...
Producing an Ionesco is usually a choice between doing it straight and emphasizing the naturalistic elements, or stripping down or beefing up the text and emphasizing the absurd. The Hub theatre in their production of The Bald Soprano choses naturalism, and proves quite effectively that the Absurd can be played like drawing room comedy...
...Ionesco's play is a brilliant satire of middle-class English society; Mr. and Mrs. Smith sit in their English sitting room after a meal of fish and chips, telling each other how great it is to be English. They are joined by Mr. and Mrs. Martin, and the Fire Chief, who comes looking for fires, but instead ravishes the Maid, and then leaves in search of his Ideal. The play ends in a very uncivil brawl, with the Martins and the Smiths shouting nonsense syllables at each other. Underlying it all is a supreme non-intelligence, the John Bullish...
Just before the play descends from confusion to chaos, Mrs. Smith says that "in real life, one must look out of the window." In Ionesco, the glass is warped, so that the images are distorted, but they are real images nonetheless. The beauty of Ionesco is that through distortion of the images he is able to show the distortion of reality. The Hub production retains enough of the subtlety of Ionesco so that the reality is clear, but is absurd enough to make it funny. It's a nice blend...