Honestly, Corneille bores me. We probably only love him (without believing in him) out of habit. We are forced to. They imposed him on us in school. I cannot stand Schiller. For a long time I thought Marivaux' plays were unserious games. Musset's comedies are thin, Vigny's are impossible to produce. Victor Hugo's bloody dramas make us laugh wildly. In exchange, no matter what anyone might say, it is hard enough to laugh when you watch most of Labiche's comic plays. Dumas-fils, with his Camille, is ridiculously sentimental. And the others! Oscar Wilde? Flimsy; Ibsen? Heavy; Strindberg? Clumsy. A contemporary playwright, whose grave is still fresh, Giraudoux, sometimes stays on stage without crossing over to you. Like Cocteau's drama, he appears to us as artificial and superficial. Its polish is gone. Cocteau uses too obvious theatrical means. Language means and strings, sophisticated strings of course, but they are still strings – with Giraudoux. Pirandello himself is obsolete, as his drama is based on theories of personality and of the truth with numerous faces and which appear as limpid as daylight, now that we have psychoanalysis and the psychologies of depths. Confirming the adequacy of Pirandello's theories, modern psychology, which necessarily goes further than Pirandeloo in explaining the human mind, certainly makes Pirandello valid, but also makes him insufficient and useless. Because it expresses better and more scientifically than Pirandello what Pirandello used to say. The value of his drama therefore does not have to do with his contribution to psychology, it has to do with its theatrical quality, which is necessarily elsewhere: we are no longer interested in watching in order to discover the antagonisms of the personality, we are interested in what he does with them theatrically. His theatrical value proper is extra-scientific, it is beyond his ideology. With Pirandello, only his mechanics, his game are left. One more proof that the theater, which is only built on one ideology, a philosophy, and which owes everything to that ideology and that philosophy, is constructed on sand, it collapses. His very theatrical language, his purely theatrical instinct makes Pirandello still be alive today. Similarly, with Racine, it is not the psychological truth of passions that maintains his drama. It is what Racine did with these truths as a poet and playwright. If we counted the playwrights that can still move the audience, we would find about 20 of them, over the centuries – 30 at the most. But there are thousands of paintings, poems, and novels speaking to us. The theater lacks the necessary naïveté for a work of art. I am not saying a great poet, a great naïve cannot emerge. However, I cannot see him at the horizon currently. I mean a lucid naïveté, springing out of the deep sources of the being, revealing them, revealing them to ourselves, restoring our naïveté, our secret being to us. For now, there are no more naïve people, not among the spectators, or among playwrights. So, what is wrong with playwrights, with plays? Their strings, as I said, namely their too obvious tools. The theater may appear as an inferior literary genre, a minor one. It always appears as a little coarse. It is a special-effects art, that is sure. It cannot do without them, and this is exactly what is wrong with it. Effects can only be coarse. You get the impression they make things heavier. The nuances of literary texts grow dim. A drama of literary subtleties is used up very fast. Semitones get dim or they disappear in a light that is too strong. If there is no penumbra, sophistication is not possible. Demonstrations, plays that prove a point are coarse, everything in them is approximate. Drama is not the language of ideas. When the theater tries to become a vehicle for ideologies, it can only make them vulgar. It simplifies them in a dangerous manner. It makes them primitive, it downgrades them. It becomes "naïve" in the bad sense of the word. Any ideology theater runs the risk of being nothing else than patronage theater. What would be not its use, but its own function if the theater was condemned to reiterate philosophy, or theology, or politics, or pedagogy? A psychological theater is not psychological enough. Instead of going to see the dramatic illustration of that particular political idea, I prefer to read my usual newspaper or listen to the speeches made by my party's candidates. Discontent with the great naïveté, with the rudimentary character of the theater, philosophers, literary people, ideologues, sophisticated poets, intelligent people are trying to make the theater intelligent. They write with intelligence, taste, and talent. They put there what they think, express their attitudes on life, their ideas about the world, they believe the play should be the illustration of some thesis, whose solution is shown on stage. Sometimes they ascribe to their works the structure of a syllogism, where the fist two acts of the play are the premises and the third act is the conclusion. No one can deny the fact that sometimes the construction is excellent. However, this is not in keeping with our theatrical exigency, because it does not take the theater out of that intermediary zone that is not entirely art – to which discursive thought can only serve as fuel. Neither is that zone an entirely different, loftier plane of the mind.
by Eugen Ionescu (1909-1994)
