SOURCE: “The Anti-Spiritual Victory in the Theater of Ionesco,” in Modern Drama, Vol. 2, No. 2, May 1959, pp. 29-35.

In the following essay, Pronko argues that in Ionesco’s theater impersonal, anti-spiritual forces, symbolized in physical objects, dominate and conquer humankind, and that dead things are victorious over that which is alive.

The French Dramatists who began writing about 1950, baptized by M. Jean Duvignaud the “School of Paris,” have sometimes been called “anti-theatrical,” for they employ dramatic methods which are frequently opposed to those of the conventional theater. Writers like Ionesco, Beckett, and the early Adamov wish to return to what might be called “pure theater,” that is to say a type of theater employing means which are strictly theatrical and do not belong to the realms of philosophy, psychology, sociology or politics. One of the favorite devices of such a theater is the presentation of the author’s views...