IONESCO Eugène. [Conceptions of theater in parallel with tho - Lot 193

IONESCO Eugène. [Conceptions of theater in parallel with those of Antonin Artaud]. Autograph manuscript signed. No place or date, 6 folio pages, in blue ink on ruled paper. "Theater (because bourgeois or popular or ideological) instead of being the expression of an acute awareness - and moreover also - of the condition of man, of reality, instead of being revealing in a bitterly comic or tragic way as dreams and nightmares sometimes are, has only contributed to putting protective and concealing screens between us and the world. It is false (political and tendentious), incomplete (considering only superficial aspects that do not engage the total being), cosy (light salon comedy, patronage optimism), dramatic on secondary problems, i.e. mediocrely dramatic. It has settled us into comfort or a dreamless sleep. It is therefore neither profound life nor knowledge, which amounts to the same thing, because we know by experiencing. This, it seems to me, is Antonin Artaud's main criticism of the theater, of the art of his time. This is followed by lengthy analyses of the qualities and, above all, the shortcomings of today's theater, ending with: "Artaud is also an example of the fact that any precise solutions that might be given are not worth the ardor, the life, the very desperate approach of the spirit. As for 'solutions', they become systems, the very suffocating systems that Artaud denied". Numerous alterations. Thirteen deleted lines remain legible.