Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco ( 1909-1994) (born Nov. 26, 1909, Slatina, Rom.—died March 28, 1994, Paris, France), Romanian-born French dramatist whose one-act “antiplay” La Cantatrice chauve (1949; The Bald Soprano) inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd.

Elected to the Académie Française in 1970, Ionesco remains among the most important dramatists of the 20th century.

Ionesco’s achievement lies in having popularized a wide variety of nonrepresentational and surrealistic techniques and in having made them acceptable to audiences conditioned to a naturalistic convention in the theatre. His tragicomic farces dramatize the absurdity of bourgeois life, the meaninglessness of social conventions, mechanical nature of modern civilization. His plays build on bizarrely illogical or fantastic situations using such devices as the humorous multiplication of objects on stage until they overwhelm the actors.