The Lesson
(Ionesco)
The Lesson, by Ionesco is a play about status and control. We see a confident young girl come for lessons from a renowned professor. She dominates the professor at the beginning with her youth and confidence, but soon the Professor begins to take over control of the girl until at the end she is killed by him, with the assistance of his housekeeper, and the stage is set to begin again with another young girl. The play is designed to be performed cyclically so that the end is really the beginning and the inevitable play of wits between youth and age, power and manipulation is staged over and over again as a part of the game of life itself.
Eugene Ionesco was born in 1909 in Slatina, Romania. The son of a French mother and Romanian father, the family moved to Paris in 1911. However, Ionesco?s father secretly divorced his mother and took him back to Romania in 1919. Ionesco was unhappy in Romania and after studying French at the University of Bucharest he moved back to France during the Second World War.
Ionesco was more comfortable with the term antiplay in regards to his theatre. He was an experimental writer for avant-garde drama and used symbolism and language to go beyond the superficial meanings which he saw in realistic theatre. The post-war French theatre of the absurd often perceived life as hollow and cynical after the devastations of the holocaust and the atomic bomb witnessed during the Second World War. However, the plays also produced a profound sense of beauty in their use of language and imagery that went beyond realistic drama.
Resumos Relacionados
- Badal Sircar?s ?third Theatre?
- Waiting For Godot
- The Seagull
- Waiting For Godot
- Glass Menagerie
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