Word: lonesco
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Adamov, 61, Russian-born playwright of the absurd; by his own hand (an overdose of barbiturates); in Paris. As a young author, writing to expose his "anguish, masochism, perversions and preoccupations," Adamov turned out plays (La Parodie, 1947; L'Invasion, 1949) that earned him ranking with Beckett and lonesco as a founder of the theater of the absurd. His best-known work was 1955's Le Ping-Pong, an angry indictment of man's dehumanization by machines. "Life is not absurd," he finally admitted. "It is difficult, just very difficult...
...deepest resources of the imagination. No one else's emblems of the irrational at the core of man-not Jean Genet's black white Negroes, not Samuel Beckett's ashcans, not even Jerzy Grotowski's Holy Auschwitz-are quicker or more deadly than Eugene lonesco's best: when he bothers to aim, he can knock the cigarette from one's lips at 40 paces. As Death and the nun came together onstage in Dusseldorf in the world premiere of lonesco's The Triumph of Death, applause spattered through the theater...
Poignant Atrocity. The morbid embrace is but one flash in a carnival of images on the single Lenten theme with which lonesco and Director Karl Heinz Stroux hold the audience alternately uneasy and tittering for two unbroken hours. Death, along with madness, is the heartland of the absurd today, recalling how, three and four centuries ago, the dance of death, along with the ship of fools, was the obsession of so much European painting and writing. For The Triumph of Death, lonesco reaches not only to Albert Camus, but also back to the Bruegel painting that bears the same title...
...lonesco cannot sustain this elegant intensity at full stretch, though in the past he has done so. Where a play like Rhinoceros was intransigently original, as the imagery of The Triumph of Death cumulates, it becomes literary, reminiscent; often beautiful, it is eventually muffled in echo. Worse, satiric invention flags, seeks easy targets: political speakers who die, pompous doctors who die. At the end, the plague abates, but Death still waits, for the city and the few survivors are consumed by fire. An arbitrary close. But that's the point...
...lonesco is eloquent in his own defense, asserting in a program note that while Camus went to the plague to give moral and even political meaning to the absurd, he himself has the diametrical aim of taking meaning away. "Death is the ultimate threat . . . but in fact even those who think they know this, know it not." The Triumph of Death is a gaudy, funny feast of cynicism and imagery. It is unforgettable, but it is oddly without consequence. At its prodding, terror, mortal terror, twitches and rolls over but will not wake...