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‘The Bald Soprano’: Take a look at one of the most beautiful—and eccentric—books ever published
03.22.2016
06:40 pm
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Playwright Eugène Ionesco was one of the founding fathers of the Theatre of the Absurd, a school defined by cultural historian Martin Esslin (in his influential 1960 book of the same title) as a genre which dramatized Albert Camus’s philosophy that life is inherently sans meaning. That our existence on Earth is both absurd and pointless. That we’re born into a godless world. We live. We die. Along the way we might do certain things—even perform acts of great compassion or heroism—but ultimately none of it really matters. Death swallows everything and everyone in the end.
 

 
While trying to learn English via the ASSiMiL method for teaching foreign languages (which requires phonetic memorization of mundane “conversational” sentences) Ionesco was inspired by the company’s book Anglais Sans Peine (“English Without Toil”) and the generic “characters” within it, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” to write his first play, La Cantatrice Chauve or The Bald Soprano. It was debuted in Paris in 1950 but initially not much of a success.
 

 
When the play opens, we meet Mr. and Mrs. Smith in their drab sitting room. He is hidden behind his newspaper, smoking a pipe and clicking his tongue. She is darning socks. After a long moment of “English silence,” Mrs. Smith announces:

“There, it’s nine o’clock. We’ve drunk the soup, and eaten the fish and chips and the English salad. The children have drunk English water. We’ve eaten well this evening. That’s because we live in the suburbs of London and because our name is Smith.”

 

 
Ionesco’s special talent was ridiculing authority figures, brutally portraying humankind’s insignificance and lampooning the banality of everyday communication. He would artfully employ clichés and witless truisms as dialogue. His characters often talk right past one another, if not simply shouting non sequiturs into the wind. No one is ever listening to what anyone else is saying in his plays.
 

 
The Bald Soprano was composed as a sort of continuous loop. The last scene contains stage instructions to begin the performance over again, from the very first line but with “the Martins” (the dinner guests of the Smiths) doing the lines that the Smiths had just said, and vice versa. And then repeat. And then repeat again. Ionesco’s point is that the characters and their banal, absurdist dialogue are interchangeable. None of it matters. Who cares?
 

 
The Bald Soprano has been continuously performed in France since 1957 at the Théâtre de la Huchette and due to the simplicity of the language lesson-level dialogue it has been translated into many, many languages and staged the world over. Indeed, it’s one of the most widely performed plays of all time.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.22.2016
06:40 pm
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