INTERVIEWER

This sounds very pessimistic and hopeless and seems at variance with your mystical and religious tendencies.

IONESCO

Well, there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free���which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust���the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack. You know, the Cathars [a Christian sect of the later Middle Ages] believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world���which is why it doesn���t work. I don���t share this heresy. I���m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn���t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn���t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, ���You rogue! You little rogue!��� and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God���s game and laugh about it. That is why I prefer the phrase ���theater of derision,��� which Emmanuel Jacquart used for the title of his book on Beckett, Adamov, and myself, to ���theater of the absurd.���

Ionesco, interviewed