My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.
Interpretation
Eugene Ionesco emphasizes the importance of openness and fresh perspectives for audiences to truly understand and appreciate theatre.
In this quote, Eugene Ionesco highlights that his plays resonate with various demographics, including children and workers, indicating that great art is accessible regardless of social status. He asserts that a key requirement for viewers to grasp the essence of his theatre is a willingness to approach it with a fresh and open mind, suggesting that preconceived notions can hinder one's appreciation of art.
In practice
In a discussion about the accessibility of theatre to all audience types.
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.
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.
I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.
I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.
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