SOURCE: “Ritual and Poetry in Eugène Ionesco’s Theatre,” in The Texas Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 4, Winter 1962, pp. 149-58.

In the following essay, Strem asserts that Ionesco creates a personal, poetical theater by using his inner voices rather than his rational faculties to produce his work, and says that by bringing the ritual of daily life onto his stage the playwright returns to the origins of dramatic expression.

As a playwright Eugene Ionesco has a feeling of uneasiness, to say the least, about the contemporary theatre, especially about the contemporary French theatre. He accuses the latter of being too doctrinary. Too many writers are using the stage as a pulpit to expose and impose their philosophies.

His own convictions in the matter of theatrical art he summarized in his play Improvisation. Here Ionesco stages himself under his own name, demonstrating the way in which he works, or...