A Theatre of Inquietude

Abstract

The present paper aims at putting into discussion several ways of dramaturgically and scenically embodying the state of inquietude incorporated in Eugène Ionesco’s dramaturgy, placing emphasis mainly on the plays Jack, or The Submission and The Chairs. Ionesco conceives dynamic psychologies, introduces contradiction into noncontradiction, creates the presence of the absent presence, which inhabit the character projecting it into the past. From this perspective, his theatre has its source in the human anxieties and, in this respect, we note the manifestation of various ways of unmasking conventions, of materializing the state of uneasiness, of incarnating a world which is on the thin edge between the unreal and the real, the poetic and the trivial, the oneiric and the diurnal.