Arena — Season 1, Episode 345: Eugene Ionesco : the Joke's on Us
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
The absurdity of life has been Eugene lonesco's theme and preoccupation since he wrote the first of his 33 plays and, alongside Beckett and Genet, created a revolution in the theatre. Ironically, that first play, The Bald Prima Donna has become the Parisian Mousetrap, running non-stop for over 30 years and 10,000 performances. Tonight's Arena assesses the life and work of one of the century's outstanding dramatists, who, at 77, remains an unrepentant champion of the Theatre of the Absurd. Peter Hall , who directed the first Ionesco play in this country, talks about the playwright's relevance today, and Jonathan Miller ponders the difference between French and English nonsense. If, as Ionesco says, 'God created the world as a joke, our only response can be to laugh'.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.