Theatrical
Here’s another gem from Ionesco’s own lips: “I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.”
Okay, you know when you see a movie you can get hit with every type of special effect there is. You can watch a hobbit talk to Gollum and totally believe that Gollum is real and not some British guy wearing a spandex suit with little sensors on it. Pretty intense, we say.
That’s not really what Ionesco is talking about here, though. Ionesco is championing what many people might refer to as “theatricalism.”
Basically, there are actors, directors, and playwrights out there who believe that what you can do on stage is unlike anything you can do in other mediums. You can even put a rhinoceros onstage without explaining how to make it happen, because there are countless different ways to approach the problem in a theatrical setting.
There could be masks, or puppets, or actors in makeup, or actors just moving in a certain way. Spandex and sensors, you say? Pah! Theatrical style allows you to go beyond what is “real,” and that includes CGI real. The rhinos don’t have to look like actual rhinos. They don’t have to be like the raptors in Jurassic Park. They don’t even have to look like Gollum.
Theatrical style, as Ionesco hints, allows you to take risks, be daring, and go bigger than real life. The same can be said for the characters. People like Botard aren’t necessarily meant to sound like your everyday coworker. Remember, Ionesco says he works in archetypes. There’s something grand and mythic about that.
He’s not necessarily interested in making his characters talk the way people actually talk. He’s not afraid to stick a logician on stage rambling on about syllogisms for a page or two. He’s not afraid to write a pack of rhinoceroses into a play, because he knows that a theatrical approach allows you to draw on the audience’s imagination.
The idea is, if you do it right, you can turn a racehorse into a hat on stage, and, no, it doesn’t have to look absolutely “real.”