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.”

In the following essay, Tener treats the use of d&eacaute;cor and other visual and aural theatrical metaphors as the dramatic expression of internal and external forces that surround the protagonist in Ionesco’s Bérenger plays.

In the following essay, Holland argues that Ionesco, the radical innovator, restored Tradition to theater with his discovery of the inherent theatricality of language, as he moved away from the defeatist and fatalist attitudes of other modernists and brought theater back to the stage in the form of original work.

In the following essay, Brée studies three Ionesco plays from the 1960s, A Stroll in the Air, Exit the King, and Hunger and Thirst, in relation to his essays of the same period, and argues that the dramas constitute an effort on the part of the playwright to communicate, via the state, a view of life as “provisional, sincere, problematic, yet positive. ”

In the following essay, Ionesco sums up his reasons for writing, which include trying to recapture the paradisiacal light of his childhood and reveal it to others; communicating what he considers to be the dazzling miracle of existence, complete with its joys and horrors; and affirming through the creative act his presence in the universe.

In the following essay, Witt discusses the polar states such as evanescence and heaviness, lightness and darkness, open space and restriction, that are evident in Ionesco’s plays; notes his use of the arrangement of spatial images; and asserts that Ionesco’s characters are hemmed in, lonely creatures longing for liberation.

In the following essay, Thomson argues against critics who appraise Ionesco in terms of his plays’ meaning, and calls for a reassertion of interest in the playwright’s work based on his “manner” rather than his “matter.” He goes on to discuss the use of games as they operate in Ionesco’s absurd world.

In the following essay, Lane examines the role of décor in Ionesco’s plays, asserting that the external surroundings interact with other “characters” on stage in a wide range of relationships, for example as antagonists and collaborators.

In the following essay, Kott observes the tragic-farcical impression of death in Eugène Ionesco's plays.

In the following essay, Newberry examines the development of Ionesco’s dramatic technique, especially in La Cantatrice Chauve, Les Chaises, and Le Roi se meurt, all of which, the critic considers, share a common element: “the indivisible mixture of tragedy and comedy.”

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.

In the following essay, Dukore analyzes The Bald Soprano and The Lesson to show that, contrary to Ionesco’s critics, his plays are not formless or meaningless, and explains that while his works are unorthodox and not concerned with psychological realism or political ideology, in Ionesco’s drama form is a direct outgrowth of subject matter.

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.

In the following essay, Sontag notes that Ionesco’s early work, in which he discovers and uses theatrically the poetry of clichés and language-as-thing, is interesting and original. However, she finds his later work infused with a crude, simplistic negativity that is extracted from his earlier artistic discovery, and considers his attitudes a “type of misanthropy covered over with fashionable clichés of cultural diagnosis.”

In the following essay, an earlier version of which appeared in her volume, Ionesco: A Collection of Critical Essays published by Prentice Hall in 1973, Lamont explores the bizarre world of Ionesco’s dramas, where the protagonists are in search of perfection as they live in dreariness; where objects seem to be endowed with independent existence; where a feeling of heaviness hangs over people; where relief from drudgery is usually fleeting; where the absurdities of existence are expressed in a disloc...

The generic difference between [Le Solitaire, a novel, and Ce Formidable Bordel!, a play,] is actually slight, beyond obvious and superficial differences in form. Whether or not the generic question be judged a fruitful subject for debate aǵain matters little. The novel is full of "dramatic" techniques and over half the play is built on "non-dramatic" chunks of prose appropriate to a novel…. What I find compelling about this symbiotic pair, however, is not the havoc...

In the following essay, Craddock argues that a major concern in Ionesco’s work is the breaking out of confining social structures and awakening of the individual to the full potentialities of existence. According to Ionesco this can be done through exercising the imagination and creativity, those innate capacities that are best developed in solitude, which is where humans find their true selves.

[In the following review of Théâtre complet, an edition of Ionesco's plays edited by Emmanuel Jacquart, Sheringham surveys the themes of Ionesco's works.]

[Brombert is an American educator and critic who specializes in nineteenth-century French literature. In the following review, he offers a mixed assessment of Ionesco's attack on Victor Hugo in Hugoliad.]

Like Beckett, [Ionesco] does not take literature seriously, though he keeps on writing plays. He acknowledges his indebtedness to Kafka, who shared his obsessions. His plays, like the fiction of Kafka, are not intended to convey a message, a rationally defined meaning. He composed The Bald Soprano in order "to prove that nothing had any real importance."… He finds existence "sometimes unbearable, painful, heavy and stultifying, and sometimes it seems to be the manifestation of Go...

[Gussow is an American editor, educator, biographer, and critic. In the following obituary, he provides an overview of Ionesco's life and works.]

In the following essay, Retford explores four categories of irony in The Lesson, The Bald Soprano, The Killer, and Victims of Duty, and asserts that Ionesco uses irony to reflect and world in flux and as a statement of his metaphysical sentiments that life is both tragic and comic.

[Weightman is an English educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he presents a mixed assessment of La quête intermittente.]

[A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Albee is an American playwright, scriptwriter, poet, and short story writer. In the following tribute, he remarks on how Ionesco influenced his approach to drama.]

[Nemoianu is a Romanian-born American educator and critic. In the review below, he comments on Ionesco's concerns and literary method in Non.]

[Dorian is a Romanian-born novelist, poet, and short story writer who now lives in the United States. In the following review, she remarks favorably on Non.]

[By accentuating and accelerating the disjointedness of character, setting and situation] the theater of the absurd turned the professor into a central figure for the representation of man's condition in the modern world, in a way neither Mr. Chips nor his cousins, Molière's Docteurs, could have represented it. Ionesco's Professor [in La Leçon is] … obviously steeped in the tradition of the stage professor, a tradition which for both its comic and tragic effects sup...

The Dance of Death and the Triumph of Death are themes that appeared across late medieval and Renaissance Europe in the visual arts, poetry and drama. Death snatching people away became a favourite subject of didacticism. In Germany, France and Switzerland, particularly, the lasting impressions made by extant murals, verses and plays have continued into our time. (p. 107) In Ionesco, we find [a] most stunning use of the medieval Dance of Death. In his [Massacre Games], the ominousness of Death, his dignity ...

When speaking of his dramatic writings, Ionesco has always insisted on their obsessional nature and … before the first performance of Rhinocéros in Paris, he described as his starting-point a particularly haunting obsession, the mutation of people into dangerous monsters once they have succumbed to some new fanaticism or ideology. Had not the preceding 25 years proved that they not only looked like rhinoceroses, but had really been turned into these ferocious beasts? That was as far as Ionesco...

It is disconcerting to experience the world on the stage, but in The Killer, it is there all the same. The atmosphere hovers over the action, a metaphysical cloud in our midst; on the stage, the machinations of our humdrum, hurried world…. We are aware that the play is about the System, the Establishment, the State, and we feel good because we have labelled a part. There is security in labelling. We know that the play has characters representing the crowd, the bureaucrat—all those who have sac...

[A French-born American educator and critic, Lamont is the author of Ionesco (1973) and The Two Faces of Ionesco (1977). Below, she favorably assesses La quête intermittente.]

[Lahr is an American critic, nonfiction writer, playwright, and novelist. In the following tribute, he surveys the themes and techniques of Ionesco's works.]

Ionesco has always been such a master of the banal that he has run the risk of seeming either trivial or merely satirical. In his early absurdist plays "The Bald Soprano," "The Lesson" or "The Chairs," he pushed the polite conventionalities of middle-class life to the point of madness—mad refusals to deal with failure, danger, old age, suffering or anything else that good manners are compelled to ignore. The object of his contempt appeared to be the smug bour...