Word: ionesco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...literary critic George Neveaux wrote, "The entire theatre of an era came out of the womb of that play, Six Characters." Pirandello's revolution in form and content profoundly influenced the works of Sartre, Anouilh, Genet, Camus, Ionesco, Beckett, and many other playwrights. Pirandello's dramaturgy contributed significantly to this new form of theatre--his acceptance of the stage for what it was, his knowledge that it did not need to be a true-to-life copy of the real thing. He saw the stage as a place of magic and illusion...
...when the Nazis occupied France. This has kept me with a lifelong, perverse preoccupation with world wars; and again, to make my biases very clear. I do not like them. So while I am not a pacifist, Christian or otherwise--the experience of the Thirties, so perfectly distilled in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, rules this out--I have a very strong belief that no war is very often better than war (indeed, a world war was avoidable as late as September 1938). It would be a mistake to make you believe that I have for actual, real-life military battles...
...would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author, 66, is best known as a painter and playwright with an intellectual kinship to Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco...
...play begins in the humdrum way with which Ionesco likes to put his audience at false ease. The middle-aged Choubert is reading a newspaper and his wife Madeleine is darning socks. A knock on the door brings in a detective. Shyly he asks if Choubert knows a man named Mallot whose name ends either with a t or a d. Soon the questioning and the tone turn inquisitional...
...becomes boy. The conclusive finding: Choubert hated his father and adored his mother. Some critics regard Victims of Duty as a parody of both the Oedipal myth and the Oedipus complex. This off-Broadway revival blunts all the wickedly comic points. The people involved may be thanked for doing Ionesco, but not for doing him in. -T.E.K...