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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the imaginative and transformative power of theatre, suggesting that it is a space where creativity knows no bounds.
Eugene Ionesco's quote emphasizes the surreal and limitless nature of theatre, where the ordinary can be transformed into the extraordinary. He highlights the paradox of how, despite being a realm of imagination and daring creativity, it can also stifle daring and innovation in practice. Through metaphors like a tortoise turning into a racehorse, Ionesco demonstrates the capacity for drastic transformation in artistic expression.
In practice
During a theatre lecture, I could use this quote to illustrate the creativity involved in stage productions.
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.
I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.
Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.
The thing to remember when you're writing," he said, " is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into--if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes.
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