SOURCE: “Ionesco: Paroxysm and Proliferation,” in The Psychology of Tragic Drama, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 102-26.

In the following essay, Roberts explores the intensification of plot, incongruity, and parodistic fantasy that are characteristic of Ionesco’s plays, and asserts that his dramas display “the insight of a veritable master of the irrational.”

Eugene Ionesco, writing of his own theatrical ambitions, argues as follows:¹

What was needed … was to go right down to the very basis of the grotesque, the realm of caricature … to push everything to paroxysm, to the point where the sources of the tragic lie. To create a theatre of violence—violently comic, violently dramatic.

The path to the ‘basis of the grotesque’ lay through introspection, an examination of the inner life: defending himself in the Observer against Kenneth Tynan’s attack on his subjectivism, he wrote:²

To discover the fundamental problem common to all...