Reviews

Victims of Duty (2007)

"Who knew there was still an empty niche in Philly's jam-packed theater scene? Well, there was, and the new Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium has come to fill it with its specialty, the Theater of the Absurd. Eugene Ionesco's Victims of Duty is a bizarre, rarely seen work by the Romanian/French playwright whose Rhinoceros and The Chairs are classics of the modern stage."
Toby Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Director's Notes

March 2007

Victims of Duty: A Fun House of Mirrors

The IRC's inaugural season is underway, and we're glad you’re here to experience Ionesco's parody of conformist modern life. We're excited to flex our absurdist muscles with this disturbing yet hilarious gem written in 1952.

I'm interested to know your reactions to this play. When I first read Victims last year, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers came to mind, as well as shades of Mel Brooks, especially Young Frankenstein. When I asked friends to give Victims a read, not a few responded with "It's so disturbing…it's so dark." I reacted to the hilarity of the existential struggle, the absurdity of the lengths to which we will go to keep our fears and demons at bay, and the beauty that arises from not knowing -- the formlessness that's required to sustain faith and make personal sense of it all.

Victims' Nicholas explains, "we are not so much ourselves as another" and "personality doesn't exist." As the actors explored these ideas, they challenged themselves to simply respond to what was given them by the other characters, to be affected by the unfolding experience, without thinking or analyzing.  We all were, as Choubert explains, “surprised to be.”

Ionesco’s thoughts:  “We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be reintegrated.”

For the actors working through it all and for me as a director/spectator attempting to negotiate the tricky tonal balance in Ionesco’s work, we often felt as though we were walking a tightrope hovering above a very deep abyss. As the Detective in Victims sizes up Choubert's existential problem to this wife Madeleine: "He's either too heavy or too light." These discoveries made our Victims rehearsal process an exciting and confounding one, a joy wrapped in an enigma. When we got stuck, I tried to imagine Ionesco himself giving us advice, explaining what he really intended. What I was left with in the end is that our struggle and confusion were the point of it all, and exactly how he would have wanted it.

Thanks for spending your evening with us.

Tina Brock
Artistic Director