In his one-act play Jacques ou a Submissão [Jack, or the Submission] (1955), now performed by Ensemble in a staging by Jorge Pinto, Eugène Ionesco tries his hand at a peculiar family drama. Jacques is entangled in a game of social conventions from whose rules he wishes to free himself; his story is “brought, little by little”, according to Ionesco, “through refusal of the human condition – in other words, of this family-based order – into the most complete submission, to the point that he resigns himself to a sort of biological quietude”. The arc of this path, filled with surreal situations and elements of humour and hysteria, develops mostly on the realm of words. It is through the work on language, ranging from moments of nonsense to discourse denounced as an instrument of power, that a risible burlesque is turned into an apotheosis of modern grotesque. Ultimately, Ionesco’s theatre of the unusual confronts us with man’s solitude and insignificant existence.