The French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco’s ambivalent attitude towards the power, even the usefulness, of language played out throughout his career. Speaking of Jean-Paul Sartre, Ionesco (1909–94) said that he ‘wrote an important book called Words and there he noticed that he had talked too much all his life. That words are not saying anything.’ Later, Ionesco claimed ‘[w]ords no longer demonstrate anything. Words just chatter. Words are escapism. Words prevent the utterance of silence.’

Writing in the shadow of World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Theodore W. Adorno’s maxim that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz, Ionesco was one of the leading playwrights profiled in Martin Esslin’s hugely influential The Theatre of the Absurd (1961). In Ionesco’s description: ‘Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose … Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost: all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.’