Victims of Duty
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Though Choubert pontificates about the lack of evolution in drama, he’s soon embroiled in a detective story himself: a mysterious, unnamed gumshoe calls and asks for help tracking down a man named Mallot. Choubert’s quest to find the missing man turns into a voyage of self-discovery as the detective urges him to delve endlessly into the “mud” of his memory and dreams: if he doesn’t come to understand who this Mallot fellow is, at least he’ll better understand himself.
The idea of detective story as metaphysical journey to self-knowledge was hardly new even 40 years ago–just ask Sophocles about the guy who set out to find the man who would kill his father and marry his mother. Earlier in this century, around Ionesco’s time, J.B. Priestley, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ugo Betti toyed with similar ideas, and there’s been a spate of late-20th-century pseudo-psycho detective twaddle on the same themes (Mickey Rourke in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, Kevin Costner in No Way Out–a remake of the 1948 The Big Clock).
Despite the metaphysical baggage this play carries and its repetitiveness, Victims of Duty is one of Ionesco’s more accessible plays, perhaps because the philosophical material is by now so familiar. It’s also the most cinematic work of his I’ve seen, shifting effortlessly from scene to scene, from dream sequence to dream sequence with a mischievous playfulness that may well have influenced the experiments with linear time and structure of the directors in the French New Wave.
