Author's Background

Eugène Ionesco and Theatre of the Absurd

Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994) was a Romanian born French playwright. Overcoming his initial disdain for theatre (‘it was the presence on the stage of flesh-and-blood people that embarrassed me’), he became a prolific playwright, with some 30 major works to his name (Esslin 2001, p.137). His most performed plays include The Bald Prima Donna (1950), The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), Rhinoceros (1959) and Exit the King (1962). The Killing Game is one of his later plays (1970).


Ionesco is one of the major playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. In the groundbreaking book (The Theatre of the Absurd) first published in 1961, Martin Esslin identified common threads connecting the works of several significant playwrights of the post World War Two period, notably Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov and Boris Vian. Although their works were very different, they all shared an anti-naturalist tendency, a distrust of language as a tool for meaningful communication, a marriage of structure and content and most significantly an Absurdist world view. Adopting the term from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Esslin argues that for all these playwrights the human condition is absurd. In Ionesco’s words:


‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose…Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless’ (qtd. in Esslin 2001, p.23).


Far from being hopelessly bleak, the absurd position challenges us to face a world devoid of grand narratives (History, Science, God…) and to do so with courage, humanity, love and humour. After all, when Sisyphus reached the summit after endlessly pushing a rock up and watching it roll back down, Camus says: ‘see, he is smiling’.


This semester, the Theatre Program is mounting 2 works from the Absurdist canon: Ionesco’s The Killing Game by the First-Year Theatre students and in October, the Third-Years will be performing Genet’s The Balcony.


Helen Trenos 28 August, 2015

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The Killing Game - a comedy by Eugène Ionesco

There are no preliminary symptoms. The autopsies have revealed nothing. Science is helpless...

No one is safe when 'the sickness' begins to invade. Community leaders struggle to maintain control while paranoia and panic spread through the population. 

As chaos ensues one thought remains - we can't all die...can we?

Presented by First-Year Theatre Students

Directed by Helen Trenos

Season and ticket details:

The Annexe Theatre, Inveresk, Launceston 7250.

Four shows only, 23-26 September at 7pm. 

Tickets - $10

Free for Bachelor of Contemporary Arts students and TCotA staff.

Door sales available or for bookings: 63244450 

Monday - Thursday: 9am - 4pm.

Come and seal your fate.

Notes from the Director…

‘death is, of course, not always unwelcome in the stage space. We frequently see it enacted. It is the traditional ending to many dramas: obligatory in tragedy. The audience comes to see blood spilt, to witness the rituals of death, with the proviso that the actor will in a moment spring up and take a bow’ (Ward 2010, p. 142).

Actors love to die on stage. Not in the metaphorical sense of performing badly, but in enacting their characters’ deaths: the last gasps, screams, death rattles, the frail arms extended to loved ones, the famous last words. The First-Year Theatre students of 2015 are, therefore, in their element because there is a lot of dying in Ionesco’s The Killing Game: 95 characters and each one of them dies. Those that don’t suddenly drop dead from the mysterious ‘plague’ wracking their city die of other causes: murder, suicide, loneliness, grief, despair. Whatever the cause, death is imminent, mechanical, and, grotesquely, a form of light relief. In fact, the play’s French title—Jeux de Massacre—is derived from the sideshow game where punters try to knock down as many human-like dolls as they can.

With death comes corpses, and in The Killing Game, there is a proliferation of corpses. This is vintage Ionesco: what Esslin describes as the ‘horror of proliferation—the invasion of the stage by evergrowing masses of people or things’ (Esslin 2001, p.150). The corpses that litter the stage—simultaneously comic, grotesque and tragic—force the characters (and we, the audience) to acknowledge the ever-presence of death, to question what it means to face and experience death; to face Ionesco’s provocation: that ‘failing to face the issue of death’, we ‘are not fully alive’ (Esslin 2001, p. 193).

I would like to congratulate the First-Year Theatre Students. In tackling The Killing Game, they demonstrated remarkable esprit de corps. Their work off and on stage—supèrbe!

- Helen Trenos

References:

Esslin, M 2001, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd edn, Methuen, London.

Ward, N 2010, ‘The Death of the Actor’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 140-147.