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My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.
Eugène Ionesco, The Paris Review interview, 1984
Playwright who looked at the world after World War II and decided the only honest response was absurdity.
Theatre of the Absurd. That’s what Martin Esslin called it, the critic who gave it a name, wrote the book that defined the movement. Esslin was also a professor. My professor, actually. Called me stupid because my dyslexia fucked up my spelling. Guy could identify genius in Ionesco’s work but couldn’t see past a misspelled word to what a student was actually saying. That’s academia for you.
The Bald Soprano, 1950. Characters having conversations that don’t mean anything, saying things that don’t connect, language breaking down into noise. People sitting in a theatre watching it, realizing that’s how we all talk, empty words, social niceties, bullshit filling the air.
Rhinoceros, 1959. Everyone in a small town slowly turns into rhinoceroses. Conformity as disease. Fascism as contagion. One guy refuses to transform, stays human while everyone around him becomes a beast. The play’s about Nazism, about communism, about any ideology that turns people into a herd.
The Chairs. An old couple on an island, setting up chairs for invisible guests who never come. Waiting for meaning that doesn’t arrive. Beckett without the poetry, more brutal, more funny in a way that makes you want to scream.
Critics hated him at first. Audiences walked out. Then suddenly everyone got it. The emptiness. The meaninglessness. Language failing completely. Post-war Europe understood… after the camps, after the ovens, after six million dead, after the systematic industrial murder of human beings, what the fuck are you supposed to say? What words exist? There’s nothing. No language for that. No way to make sense of it. Absurdity wasn’t a choice. It was the only honest response to a world that had just revealed itself to be completely, utterly insane.
Shot on infrared film in Cimetière du Montparnasse. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.