Playwrights on Playwriting by Toby Cole

Author:Toby Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 1988-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

1 John Osborne, “They Call it Cricket,” Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), pp. 45–66. Copyright 1957 by MacGibbon and Kee. Reprinted by permission of E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., and MacGibbon and Kee, London.

EUGENE IONESCO

(b. 1912)

The Starting Point1 (1955)

ALL MY PLAYS have their origin in two fundamental states of consciousness: now the one, now the other is predominant, and sometimes they are combined. These basic states of consciousness are an awareness of evanescence and of solidity, of emptiness and of too much presence, of the unreal transparency of the world and its opacity, of light and of thick darkness. Each of us has surely felt at moments that the substance of the world is dreamlike, that the walls are no longer solid, that we seem to be able to see through everything into a spaceless universe made up of pure light and color; at such a moment the whole of life, the whole history of the world, becomes useless, senseless, and impossible. When you fail to go beyond this first stage of dépaysement—for you really do have the impression you are waking to a world unknown—the sensation of evanescence gives you a feeling of anguish, a form of giddiness. But all this may equally well lead to euphoria: the anguish suddenly turns into release; nothing counts now except the wonder of being, that new and amazing consciousness of life in the glow of a fresh dawn, when we have found our freedom again; the fact of being astonishes us, in a world that now seems all illusion and pretense, in which all human behavior tells of absurdity and all history of absolute futility; all reality and all language appear to lose their articulation, to disintegrate and collapse, so what possible reaction is there left, when everything has ceased to matter, but to laugh at it all? I myself at one such moment felt so completely free, so released, tiiat I had the impression I could do anything I wished with the language and the people of a world that no longer seemed to me anything but a baseless and ridiculous sham.

Of course this state of consciousness is very rare; this joy and wonder at being alive, in a universe that troubles me no more and is no more, can only just hold; more commonly the opposite feeling prevails: what is light grows heavy, the transparent becomes dense, the world oppresses, the universe is crushing me. A curtain, an impassable wall stands between me and the world, between me and myself; matter fills every corner, takes up all the space and its weight annihilates all freedom; the horizon closes in and the world becomes a stifling dungeon. Language breaks down in a different way and words drop like stones or dead bodies; I feel I am invaded by heavy forces, against which I can only fight a losing battle.

This was definitely the starting point of those of my plays that are generally considered the more dramatic: Amédée and Victims of Duty.

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