THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

Eugène Ionesco found the absurdity of life not in grand philosophical statements but in the petty routines of everyday people. A man and woman sit in armchairs, trading banal phrases about the weather and grocery prices – until, to their amazement, they realize they’re husband and wife. This iconic scene from Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano (1949), is typical of his approach . He loved to expose how empty and automatic our social dialogues can be. In his hands, the clichés and small talk of bourgeois life become hilariously meaningless, and then, suddenly, menacingly alien.

Romanian-born but writing in French, Ionesco was a founding figure of what Martin Esslin later called the Theatre of the Absurd . He didn’t set out to write “Absurdism” as a doctrine – in fact, he disliked the label – ...