Heartland of the Absurd

In the plague-stricken city, in a deserted street, where doors are sealed with a scrawled cross and "God Save Us," two citizens meet and, at a safe distance, talk. "I have a gun, be careful, stay back." One finds he knows a friend of the other's, newly dead. "Then I am a dead man." Enter a nun, robed all in flowing white, carrying a little white case with a red cross on it. "Sister, help me." She swirls up to first citizen, kisses him on the mouth: "Yes, you are a dead man." She kisses second citizen on the mouth: "You are a dead man too." Death enters, robed in black.

The nun dances up to him, trills: "And I am a dead woman." Death enfolds her, black arms around white. They sway together and dance off.

The greatest strength of surreal "anti-theater" is, in point of fact, intensely theatrical: visual images that slice faster than pain can follow to the deepest resources of the imagination. No one else's emblems of the irrational at the core of man--not Jean Genet's black white Negroes, not Samuel Beckett's ashcans, not even Jerzy Grotowski's Holy Auschwitz--are quicker or more deadly than Eugene lonesco's best: when he bothers to aim, he can knock the cigarette from one's lips at 40 paces. As Death and the nun came together onstage in Dusseldorf in the world premiere of lonesco's The Triumph of Death, applause spattered through the theater.

Poignant Atrocity. The morbid embrace is but one flash in a carnival of images on the single Lenten theme with which lonesco and Director Karl Heinz Stroux hold the audience alternately uneasy and tittering for two unbroken hours. Death, along with madness, is the heartland of the absurd today, recalling how, three and four centuries ago, the dance of death, along with the ship of fools, was the obsession of so much European painting and writing. For The Triumph of Death, lonesco reaches not only to Albert Camus, but also back to the Bruegel painting that bears the same title and beyond that to Holbein, to the tradition of the 15th century frescoes of Palermo, to medieval mysteries and moralities crudely performed in the streets.

He begins as he will go on, in poignant yet heartless atrocity. Here is a crowded Sunday Square. Death rings a handbell, but to the strollers, "Ah. church is over." Now a baby is dead in its carriage. Now look, they are all dying, even the good housewife, whose last words are that "lunch is not ready!" Now here is the rich man in his house, servants spraying the air, puttying up the windows; now see how his face turns black, how he falls, how Death carts him away, how the fleeing servants are forced back inside by police with machine pistols. Now see the city prison, where the guard throws open the cell doors, but the prisoners argue the metaphysics of their predicament until they die, and the guard hangs himself. Death enters, jingles the guard's keys. The real prison is outside.

The bitter skits flow into one another, using actors as interchangeable parts, a cast of 17 playing 88 roles, stylized and depersonalized. They reach hallucinatory heights. Once, Ionesco simply puts two rooms onstage, furnishes them identically with a bed, a chair and a wait ing woman, and brings their men to them defying the curfew. "I had given up hope," each woman says, and from there the dialogues of loving, reassuring cliches go on in strict musical parallel, words and acts in either room echoing within moments in the other.

Lapidary Density. Drop by drop, like blood from a carcass, the repetitions drain meanings from the emotions. Then, on the left, the lover holds his dying girl, but "I don't hear you," she whispers, "I don't feel you. I am"--her last words--"all alone." To the right, in speech and action interwoven with the mirror scene, the terrified woman is almost out the door as her man lies dying. But then--"I know you are here," he says, "I hear you. I feel you close. I am not alone." The scene is a bravura display of counterpoint. It states with lapidary density all that the absurdists maintain about the illusions of communication and the reality--or is it even that?--of loneliness and despair.

lonesco cannot sustain this elegant intensity at full stretch, though in the past he has done so. Where a play like Rhinoceros was intransigently original, as the imagery of The Triumph of Death cumulates, it becomes literary, reminiscent; often beautiful, it is eventually muffled in echo. Worse, satiric invention flags, seeks easy targets: political speakers who die, pompous doctors who die. At the end, the plague abates, but Death still waits, for the city and the few survivors are consumed by fire. An arbitrary close. But that's the point.

lonesco is eloquent in his own defense, asserting in a program note that while Camus went to the plague to give moral and even political meaning to the absurd, he himself has the diametrical aim of taking meaning away. "Death is the ultimate threat . . . but in fact even those who think they know this, know it not." The Triumph of Death is a gaudy, funny feast of cynicism and imagery. It is unforgettable, but it is oddly without consequence. At its prodding, terror, mortal terror, twitches and rolls over but will not wake.

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