The Bérenger Plays

by Eugène Ionesco

This collection brings together the four plays that feature Ionesco's everyman protagonist Jean Bérenger. In The Killer, he comes across a radiant city , an ideal civilization which is being terrorized by a killer, whom he tries to help apprehend. In Rhinoceros, he is the only person in a provincial town who is not affected by a condition that turns its victims into the eponymous horned beast. In Exit the King, he is the powerful King Bérenger the First, who refuses to accept that he is dying. And in A Stroll in the Air he acquires the capacity of flight and sees another world lying beyond the clouds.

While each play in the Bérenger cycle is unique, they are all prime examples of Ionesco's conception of the theatre of the absurd, and touch on themes that preoccupied the author throughout his career, such as mortality, alienation, freedom and the evils of Fascism. This volume constitutes a perfect introduction to one of the twentieth century's most original and influential playwrights.

Genres: Plays

288 pages, Paperback

Published December 19, 2019

About the author

Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu, was a Romanian playwright and dramatist; one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict in a tangible way the solitude and insignificance of human existence.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Leo Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rhinoceros obviously the best—stage directions are nuts!

[Jonathan Lipman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read the Berenger plays - featuring Ionesco’s protagonist - hero? - back to back. In doing so you get to realise they’re broadly similar: the hapless Beranger struggling to make sense of a world in which pretty much every character stolidly and with indifference takes in their stride the most absurd of circumstances - such as people around then turning into rhinoceroses. Of course Ionesco is too clever not to develop the character - and Beranger’s attitude to the goings on around him does change: you’ll have to read the plays to find out how!

Absurdism’s winning suit is that there’s so much scope for humour when crazy things are happening all around - and indeed when most people are taking this in their stride. Only poor Beranger - living a nightmare - wants to make sense of it all, and in doing so he shines a light on humanity’s frailties. Absurdism presents you at once with fun and didacticism - and that’s why I love it and Ionesco so much.

Give it a try if you haven’t, yet...

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here we have two mighty oak trees flanked by thorny hedges. The Bérenger quartet clearly meant a great deal to Ionesco; read straight-through, the only way to reconcile everything that happens to the titular protagonist is to see him as his author’s alter ego – the things that Bérenger goes through are the things that Ionesco obsessed over. Like I said, the second and third plays are where it’s at: a duo both modern and timeless. The great power of Rhinoceros and Exit the King is that their subject matters are unmistakable, and each offers the individual only cold comfort in their confrontation with the mass psychosis of conformity and the private abyss of death. These two plays stand as pillars of mid-century theatre, and it’s good to have them together in a single volume. But the first and fourth plays are something else entirely. What are The Killer and A Stroll in the Air about? Maybe they play better than they read, but on the page they are as abstruse as they are unfocused, as irritating as they are frustrating, and go out of their way to say nothing about anything.