The Chairs Eugene Ionesco Script Pdf

These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. The Chairs depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. The Chairs depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life to the rest of humanity, while The Lesson is a chilling, but anarchically funny drama of verbal domination. In these three 'antiplays' dream, nonsense and fantasy combine to create an unsettling, bizarre view of society.

These are my two Rhinoceroses. They guard my fridge from, well I'm not sure, but they do guard it. They have also adopted a baby hippo into their family, but the hippos not in the picture. The play is called Rhinoceros, not Rhinoceros and Baby Hippo, so that's why the Hippo was kindly told to go away for a bit. He did not like being told to go away, and is in the process of writing a musical about hippos, which he says will make more money than some stupid play where everyone is a Rhinoceros. Fu These are my two Rhinoceroses.

Themes of conformity, culture, mass movements, mob mentality and morality. The Chairs, Eugene Ionesco. Two characters, Old Man and Old Woman, are setting up chairs for (invisible) guests who are coming to hear an orator reveal the Old Man's discovery.

They guard my fridge from, well I'm not sure, but they do guard it. They have also adopted a baby hippo into their family, but the hippos not in the picture. The play is called Rhinoceros, not Rhinoceros and Baby Hippo, so that's why the Hippo was kindly told to go away for a bit. He did not like being told to go away, and is in the process of writing a musical about hippos, which he says will make more money than some stupid play where everyone is a Rhinoceros. Fucking Hippo. Not that I don't love the Hippo, I just don't want him getting his hopes up too high; he's not Elton fucking John, and I know he's not going to be writing The Lion King. I read these plays a while ago.

I read Rhinoceros a bunch of times, and I don't remember much about it, except that it was about everyone being rhinoceroses. Chairs I don't remember at all, but I know I read it.

I think it was an absurdist portrayal of society where everyone were chairs. It was kind of at the point where Ionesco was milking the everyon is a thing that they really couldn't be theme. The Lesson, if I remember it correctly was probably my favorite of the three. I think it was the one most explicitly about fascism. Maybe it wasn't though. That's the beauty of these new reviews of mine, I have even less idea of what I'm talking about than normally. I had to perform a scene from the Rhinoceros with 3 classmates for a French class and it was certainly a great introduction to Ionesco's work.

It gave us time to contemplate and embody the scene and I fell in love. I have great respect for absurd humour. It is difficult to pin down why it works so well when an author or performer pulls it off. It is a certain kind of intelligence that requires an understanding of the culture, the ability to read people and some another element that I like to thi I had to perform a scene from the Rhinoceros with 3 classmates for a French class and it was certainly a great introduction to Ionesco's work. It gave us time to contemplate and embody the scene and I fell in love. I have great respect for absurd humour. It is difficult to pin down why it works so well when an author or performer pulls it off.

It is a certain kind of intelligence that requires an understanding of the culture, the ability to read people and some another element that I like to think of as mysterious. The Absurd World Is Alive and Well, But Not on the Stage Back when the avant-garde theatre revolved around Eugene Ionesco and other European playwrights, with a few Americans thrown in for good measure, Rhinoceros was one of his more comprehensible plays. It has a minuscule plot, an anti-hero of sorts and Ionesco’s logical conundrums are comprehensibly centered in a few characters, rather than taking over the whole play, as they do in Bald Soprano. Similarly cliches point up the limitations of th The Absurd World Is Alive and Well, But Not on the Stage Back when the avant-garde theatre revolved around Eugene Ionesco and other European playwrights, with a few Americans thrown in for good measure, Rhinoceros was one of his more comprehensible plays. It has a minuscule plot, an anti-hero of sorts and Ionesco’s logical conundrums are comprehensibly centered in a few characters, rather than taking over the whole play, as they do in Bald Soprano.

Similarly cliches point up the limitations of the characters, rather than being a central focus as in Soprano, which he calls “The Tragedy of Language” (175) in his essay on the play collected in Notes & Counter Notes. Ionesco in his writings has clearly spelled out that Rhinoceros shows how tolitarianism takes hold of a country (this is not a play about conformism, he declares), and it’s also not a comedy but a “terrible farce and fantastic fable” (French production) or in essence a tragedy (German production, 207). Unfortunately, the American production baffled him because the “hard, fierce” character Jean is turned into a comic figure, while Beringer is made to seem “a kind of tough hard-headed intellectual, a kind of unruly revolutionary who knows quite well what he’s doing” (208) rather than the irresolute, reluctant man that Ionesco envisioned.

He is put off by directors adding actions to his script, which he thinks is “sufficient” with his specific stage directions, and concluded that the American production was “intellectually dishonest” and turned Beringer into “the last of his species. This is thought to be funny” (208). The tolitarianism depicted is German fascism, and the roots of the play are clearly in the world of pre- and post-World War II, as is elucidated in his “Preface” to an American school edition.

He says his play is certainly anti-Nazi but is “mainly an attack on collective hysteria and the epidemics that lurk beneath the surface of reason and ideas but are nonetheless serious collective diseases passed off as ideologies once we realize that History has lost its reason, that lying propaganda masks a contradiction between the facts and the ideologies that explain them” (199). Deconstructing this rather ponderous pronouncement, collective hysteria is passed off as ideologies [or perhaps ideologies align with and manipulate collective hysteria] because history makes no sense, not least because language and logic no longer connect with facts, a dissonance concealed by the propaganda of ideologies. Jean, Botard and Dudard provide examples of such ideologies in the play.

Accepting that the play is an attempt at “demystification” (199) of the rise of tolitarianism, Ionesco asserts that it provides “a fairly objective description of the growth of fanaticism, of the birth of a totalitarianism that grows, propagates, conquers, transforms a whole world and, naturally, being totalitarianism, transforms it totally. The play should trace and paint the different stages of this phenomenon” (209), a concept he could never convince the American director to accept. Similarly the play isn’t about conformism, for even non-conformism can be conformist, and “an anti-conformist play may be amusing; an anti-totalitarian play.is not. It cannot be anything else but painful and serious” (209). In another essay, he becomes more specific about “hair-brained ideologies.the new plague of modern times” which create “Automatic systematized thinking, the idolization of ideologies screens the mind from reality, perverts our understanding and makes us blind.[They] dehumanize men and make it impossible for them to be friends notwithstanding.they get in the way of what we call co-existence” (207). As for the New York critic’s complaint that he hasn’t let “Beringer say what ideology inspired his resistance,” Ionesco says he distrusts intellectuals, who in fact were the “inventors of Nazism,” and “it is absurd to think for a whole world and give it some automatic philosophy: a playwright poses problems.An unworkable solution one has found for oneself is infinitely more valuable than a ready-made ideology that stops men from thinking.” Despite criticism that Ionesco didn’t provide a solution in his play, leaving the audience in a vacuum, “That is exactly what I wanted to do.

A free man should pull himself out of vacuity on his own, by his own efforts and not by the efforts of other people” (210). This is clearly an existential approach to life that was not immediately palatable to Americans in the 1960s, barely through the sub-variety of fascism known as McCarthyism. In the Cahiers du College de Pataphysique, which is the “science of science and ultimate philosophy,” an approach that derives from Alfred Jarry, a French playwright and philosopher, and encompasses the belief that “we are all pataphysicians” (200), meaning we construct our own reality, Ionesco interviews himself in a more theoretical essay on the nature and purpose of theatre. As Ionesco’s ego and alter ego argue about his plays’ didacticism and the need for a play to be considered as a complete performance, the ego declares that his intent is to break the spell of bourgeois drama, which is “magic drama.that asks the audience to identify itself with the heroes of the play, drama of participation” (202). On the other hand, a people’s theatre “has a different mentality: it puts a certain distance between itself and the heroes of the play.It alienates itself from the theatrical illusion in order to watch the play with a clear mind and pass judgment on it” (202), which is clearly a Brechtian approach. But then he goes on to state that from the Greeks through Shakespeare even to “Negro spirituals” dramatic forms revolve around audience identification and participation, thus “everything prehistorical was bourgeois” (203).

It doesn’t matter that the middle classes are the “product of the French Revolution, of our industrial civilization, of capitalism” (203). Ego claims that everyone in the play transforms themselves into rhinoceroses, and if the audience has identified, they should be disgusted with the play’s characters and themselves as well, for “Disgust alienates more completely than anything else.Disgust is lucidity” (203) and thus the audience will be brought to self-awareness. Some might also choose the “virtue of non-participation or alienation,” and if this is so then the play becomes a synthesis of a bourgeois and an anti-bourgeois play (203). But the essay ends with the remark that both men are talking rubbish. Clearly the reader (or more properly the viewer) of the play should not expect to find easy answers to characters’ inconsistent behavior or the play’s meaning.

The stage action is both startling and certainly comical, with a woman dropping her groceries but keeping hold of her cat, and a number of simultaneous conversations overlapping with similar questions and responses. Even the appearance of the rhinoceroses is disturbing and comical, as the audience tries to grasp the idea of heavy, vicious animals charging through the stage (or even seemingly the audience). Of course, the manner in which the characters respond to these events will make them either intimidating and sinister or else laughable, so as Ionesco rightly complains the production can shift and even destroy his vision of the play. Possibly some of this difficulty comes from the fact that Americans are less involved with ideologies and intellectual activity than are most Europeans. Although it is clearly a fallacy, Americans tend to believe they don’t subscribe to an ideology, even though that is what the “American dream” and the vision of America leading the world to safety and democracy clearly is, even if not spelled out in any systematic form.

Furthermore, a typical American director thinks of a play in terms of making it relateable to the audience, which, of course, is exactly what Ionesco doesn’t want. So in essence American theatre is still deeply embedded in the basic idea of bourgeois drama which is to present reality in such a way that the audience can “understand” it personally. Even American actors, following the American version of the Stanislavsky system, work to immerse themselves into the personality of their characters, and now are going to such extremes as changing their weight drastically in order to portray characters more “realistically.” Thus Ionesco’s type of play is very challenging for an American production and likely to appeal only to a limited audience more attuned to European theatrical traditions.

Which is not to say that his warning about the appeal of ideologies (even if only vaguely recognized as such--distrust of government, love of gun possession, belief in the outsider as the societal savior, etc.) and their ability to transform unaware citizens into a herd of followers is inaccurate, as the 2016 Republican Presidential primary campaign clearly demonstrated. Ionesco relies on costume to comment on and identify his characters, with the dogmatic ones dressed following whatever pattern obtains in their group: Jean is the average, conformist middle-class citizen, who doesn’t hesitate to criticize Berenger, his best friend, for his sloppy manner of dress, his drinking, being unshaven and constantly being late. In fact, whenever they’re together Jean is critical, which he claims is his right, without being in the least concerned about his friend’s feelings. Berenger, on the other hand, is apologetic about himself, and at most complains about being bored with his job and life in their small town, “I just can’t get used to life” (7). But Jean asserts that “The superior man is the man who fulfills his duty” (7). Then the first off-stage appearance of the rhinoceroses occurs, creating confusion among the characters; a woman drops her groceries but keeps hold of her cat, which she is improbably carrying while shopping.

Jean wants to protest to the town council, but Berenger remains detached from the incident, proposing far-fetched explanations how the beasts could appear. The logical Jean is aghast at Berenger’s imaginative propositions, pointing up one of Ionesco’s main themes: the deficiency of logic and the freedom of imagination, although this freedom is not without its burden as Berenger discovers at the end of the play when he’s left alone with no one to communicate with. This antithesis will continue throughout the play, with various forms of logic in the different ideologies being exposed for their deficiencies and rigidity. Logic, the foundation of the mind (which is the essence of a human), and truth, the presumed essence of reality, are the standards for pedants, such as Jean or the Logician, but Ionesco is always quick to show a logical paradox or contradiction that challenges their assumptions.

Ultimately logic creates more confusion rather than resolves anything. Berenger explains that his drinking is due to his fear, which is “a sort of anguish, difficult to describe. I feel out of place among people, and so I take to drink.I’ve been tired for years. It’s exhausting to drag the weight of my own body about. (17).I don’t even know if I am me” (18). Although sounding like an average alcoholic, this is basically Sartre’s “nausea” at the absurdity of existence. As if to counterpoint this antithesis more strongly, the Logician and the Old Gentleman now engage in a conversation about logic, purporting to show its usefulness, while demonstrating the exact opposite, and when Berenger claims, “Life is an abnormal business,” Jean responds with pseudo-logic, “On the contrary.

Nothing could be more normal, and the proof is that people go on living” (19), which cannot be the “proof” of an insufficient premise. These two separate conversations counterpoint each other in one of Ionesco’s favorite dramatic devices to show how separate conversations correlate or contradict each other because people and their thoughts are interchangeable (as happens in the Bald Soprano when the Martins replace the Smiths at the end of the play, and the play begins again). Jean’s final advice to Berenger is to immerse himself in his culture, so he will become more like everyone else, but when the latter invites the former to come with him to the theatre that evening, Jean replies he’s going for a drink with friends, showing himself for a hypocrite. The rhinos return and kill the woman’s cat, and the Logician comforts her with the statement “All cats are mortal” (27), showing logic cannot respond to emotional needs.

Act I ends with arguments about the number of horns on the rhinos, with Jean again claiming to know the truth and confusing everyone about whether Asiatic or African rhinos have one or two horns. Logic can’t answer these questions either, but the Logician prides himself on correctly posing the problem (37), which still doesn’t help with the problem of rhinos trampling a cat to death.

Act II, scene i, is the bureaucratic office where Berenger, Daisy, Botard and Dudard work. This sets up the scene for the two other rigid ideologues, Dudard, the excessively tolerant, scientific-focused intellectual who finds a way to adjust to everything because he can’t be intellectually discriminating, and Botard, the mouthpiece of the working class, rigidly anti-capitalist and anti-management, always seeing a scheme to exploit the worker. He distrusts newspapers, so doesn’t believe reports about the rhinos in town and thinks he’s logical, so will trust only his own senses (40).

He thinks his own working-class education superior to that of his bosses who attended the university: “All you get at the universities are effete intellectuals with no practical knowledge of life” (41), a view that Ionesco seems to share, although not the rest of Botard’s beliefs. Skyfall Violin Sheet Music Free Pdf. This is probably one of the more confusing (or thought-provoking) aspects of Ionesco’s plays: characters who are basically foolish may make statements that contain some aspect of a useful idea or Ionesco’s views. In effect Ionesco’s plays, while didactic, don’t have specific characters to present the author’s views, which are spread throughout the play and often need to be grasped by understanding the nature of what’s happening among the characters. This is especially true in Bald Soprano, and less so in Rhinoceros, where ultimately Berenger becomes the “anti-hero” and mouthpiece for the author.

Because Botard is so rigidly convinced of his own views, he argues the others are engaging in a hoax, “You’ve been making all this propaganda to get these rumors started” (46). This argument is interrupted when Mrs. Boeuf appears to make excuses for her husband’s absence from work; it turns out he’s become a rhinoceros. In fact, a rhino has followed her to the office and is waiting downstairs, which all the characters cluster to see. They sense it’s waiting for someone, and finally Mrs. Boeuf recognizes her husband and leaps out the window onto his back. Botard, finally convinced of the rhino’s reality, declares, “You can count on the union’s support” (51), and later after the manager declares it’s one less worker to replace, “Our union is against your dismissing Mr.

Boeuf without notice” (53). Now that he’s convinced of the rhinos’ reality, he declares, “I’m not content to simply state that a phenomenon exists. I make it my business to understand and explain it” (54). But he refuses to state his explanation, claiming the whole business is a traitorous plot, and he’ll expose the perpetrators. “Now the hallucination has become a provocation,” he insinuates threateningly (54). “I hold the key to all these happenings, an infallible system of interpretation” (55), which is a reference to Marxist ideology that claims to explain the historical development of society.

As they clamber out the window with the help of firemen (who also show up in Bald Soprano), Botard threatens to find proof of their treason, “I don’t insult. I merely prove” (56). In a nutshell, these are the attitudes of a Marxist or Communist worker, who resorts to codified explanations and accusations instead of personally analyzing the reality and responding to it instinctively and accurately. Scene 2 is Jean’s room, where Berenger finds him gradually transforming into a rhino. Jean feels ill and is greenish in color, which deepens throughout the scene. Finally, he sprouts a horn on his forehead.

Jean is still argumentative and unpleasant, while Berenger tries to apologize for their previous quarrel. Jean boasts that with his clear mind he’s in control of what happens to him, but the contrary occurs as he irresistibly turns into a rhino. Their argument reveals that Jean thinks anything that’s natural is superior to human’s moral values, “We need to go beyond moral standards!Nature has its own laws. Morality’s against Nature.” (67), the opposite of his earlier encouragement of Berenger to immerse himself in the society’s culture. Such inconsistencies, common in Ionesco, are especially noticeable in this play where there is actual plot development.

For the middle-class citizen, power (i.e., nature) now becomes the superior value, “Humanism is all washed up! You’re a ridiculous old sentimentalist.I’m all for change” (68). Here the focus is upon the transference of Jean’s earlier intellectual violence against Berenger into actual physical violence, when he declares he’ll trample Berenger.

Act III is in Berenger’s room, where he’s worrying whether he’s beginning to undergo the same transformations as Jean. Dudard arrives to comfort him, but while Berenger exclaims over the fate of Jean, “such a warm-hearted person, always so human!I felt more sure of him than of myself! And then to do that to me!” (74), clearly not the truth, Dudard criticizes Berenger for making himself the focus of his complaints. He, on the other hand, says he observes the facts and tries to explain them, using various corrupted scientific ideas, finally proposing an epidemic. Quickly they begin to discuss Berenger’s will-power (or lack thereof) as the way to handle his concerns, but the problem becomes more existential when Berenger professes an instinctive dread of the rhinos and furthermore, “I feel responsible for everything that happens.

I feel involved. I just can’t be indifferent” (78). He wishes he could be more objective, as he would be if this had happened to other people in another country, but “when you find yourself up against the brutal facts, you can’t help feeling directly concerned” (79). Dudard encourages him to face up to the facts and accept them, as you can’t do anything about them, but Berenger calls that fatalism, while to Dudard it’s common sense. When Berenger contemplates going to the authorities for help (rather like Jean previously), Dudard questions whether he has any right to object, because “who knows what is evil and what is good? It’s just a question of personal preference” (80) and states Berenger will never “become a good rhinoceros.you haven’t got the vocation” (80).

Berenger still worries that no one will take action, and then learns that their boss has turned into a rhino, which Dudard tries to explain psychologically. (Ionesco doesn’t have much belief in psychological explanations of people’s behavior, which he parodies just as he does logical explanations.) He notes how upset Botard was at this event, then launches into a critique of Botard’s approach, which he claims wasn’t “precise or objective.too passionate.and therefore over-simplified.entirely dictated by his hatred of his superiors. That’s where he got his inferiority complex and his resentment.

What’s more he talks in cliches, and commonplace arguments leave me cold” (83). Dudard’s approach is to accept what happens and provide an explanation for it, which Berenger opposes and defends Botard as “somebody worthwhile.down-to-earth.I’m in complete agreement with him and proud of it” (83). Originally published on my blog,, and in October 2001. Rhinoceros Ionesco's most famous play may have a surreal idea at its centre (that people are turning into rhinoceroses), but he uses this to say something about human nature while at the same time creating a drama which is by turns funny, surprising, and fascinating.

In the first act, the main characters, Berenger and his friend Jean, are terrorised by the first rhinoceroses, running around the streets of the town causing lots of Originally published on my blog,, and in October 2001. Rhinoceros Ionesco's most famous play may have a surreal idea at its centre (that people are turning into rhinoceroses), but he uses this to say something about human nature while at the same time creating a drama which is by turns funny, surprising, and fascinating.

In the first act, the main characters, Berenger and his friend Jean, are terrorised by the first rhinoceroses, running around the streets of the town causing lots of damage. It is only in the next scene, set in Berenger's office, that we discover that people are turning into the animals, as one of his colleagues destroys the building's staircase. Then everyone around Berenger starts to change - Jean, his colleagues and eventually the girl from his office that he had a crush on at a point when they believe they are the only remaining human beings. Finally, Berenger, alone, wonders why he can't change, begins to feel that his lack of a horn on his forehead makes him ugly, but ends with defiance against the idea of changing. Though the play is designed to make the audience think it has an ideological point, like one of 's existentialist plays, for example, it doesn't really, in my opinion.

The rhinoceroses can be interpreted, say, as people who have accepted a new totalitarian regime, but this identification can only be made vaguely, and it seems to be more that Ionesco is writing an absurdist version of this kind of drama, so that the animals do not need to have a meaning. The Chairs Two old people prepare an auditorium for a lecture. They welcome large numbers of invisible guests, holding conversations with several of them including the Emperor. Then, when the lecturer arrives, he turns out to be deaf and dumb, unable to communicate except by sign language and gibberish written on a blackboard. The conversations between the old man and woman and their imaginary guests are reminiscent of Beckett. It has the world weariness, even if the wordplay is missing. It is not particularly funny on the page, unlike Rhinoceros and The Lesson, but could come alive on the stage.

As with Ionesco's other plays, the question is whether it is meaningful or not, and, if it is, what that meaning is. There are several possibilities for the play's theme, if it has one, and the key element is what Ionesco wants to convey with the invisible characters. They are not likely to be imaginary, only present of the minds of the two old people, because the lecturer appears and the fantasy would have to be consistently shared by both of them. The implication is that any meaning the play has is to do with the audience's perception of these people, or possibly about their nature as characters in the play. The Lesson This is the only Ionesco play I have seen, and it is very funny on the stage. It describes a visit by a pupil to the house of someone who can only be described as a mad professor, who teaches her bizarre mathematics and ludicrous linguistics before attacking her with a knife. The mathematical jokes are similar to those involving the Logician in Rhinoceros, and The Lesson reads like a preparatory excercise for the later play, a less surreal version of that play's lighter moments.

The Lesson is lighter than the other plays in this collection, and so unlike them it doesn't particularly seem to need to be supplied with a meaning. “BERENGER: And you consider all this natural? DUDARD: What could be more natural than a rhinoceros? BERENGER: Yes, but for a man to turn into a rhinoceros is abnormal beyond question. DUDARD: Well, of course, that's a matter of opinion.

BERENGER: It is beyond question, absolutely beyond question! DUDARD: You seem very sure of yourself. Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins? Can you personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality?

Nobody has solved this problem yet, either medically or philosophically. You ought to know that.

BERENGER: The problem may not be resolved philosophically -- but in practice it's simple. They may prove there's no such thing as movement. And then you start walking. [he starts walking up and down the room]. Question Mark Butterfly on this page. And you go on walking, and you say to yourself, like Galileo, 'E pur si muove'.

DUDARD: You're getting things all mixed up! Don't confuse the issue.

In Galileo's case it was the opposite: theoretic and scientific thought proving itself superior to mass opinion and dogmatism. BERENGER: [quite lost] What does all that mean? Mass opinion, dogmatism -- they're just words! I may be mixing everything up in my head but you're losing yours.

You don't know what's normal and what isn't any more. I couldn't care less about Galileo. I don't give a damn about Galileo. DUDARD: You brought him up in the first place and raised the whole question, saying that practice always had the last word. Maybe it does, but only when it proceeds from theory! The history of thought and science proves that. BERENGER: [more and more furious] It doesn't prove anything of the sort!

It's all gibberish, utter lunacy! DUDARD: There again we need to define exactly what we mean by lunacy. BERENGER: Lunacy is lunacy and that's all there is to it! Everybody knows what lunacy is. And what about the rhinoceroses -- are they practice or are they theory?” —.