The Bald Soprano
(Ionesco)
The Romanian born, French playwright, Ionesco was late at starting to write plays. Not until his forties did he begin his career as a playwright and it had a strange beginning. Having decided at the age of 40 to learn English, he was struck by how absurd the lessons were. He found himself introduced to Mr. and Mrs Smith, that there are seven days in a week, that the floor is down and the ceiling up, and that other fantastic truths were introduced to him through the pages of his English textbook. He later heard Mrs. Smith inform Mr. Smith that they had several chidren and that they lived in London. Such statements between a husband and wife Ionesco found amazing, and he decided to write a play about the absurdity of life as seen through the English language learning. As Ionesco described later, "A strange phenomenon took place. I don't know how--the text began imperceptibly to change before my eyes. The very simple, luminously clear statements I had copied so diligently into my notebook, left to themselves, fermented after a while, lost their original identity, expanded and overflowed. The clichés and truisms of the conversation primer, which had once made sense ... gave way to pseudo-clichés and pseudo-truisms; these disintigrated into wild caricature and parody, and in the end language disintigrated into disjointed fragments of words."
The Bald Soprano, written in 1950, followed many of the so-called absurdist writers thoughts in the post-war era. As the hideous atrocities of the Second World War revealed, life was absurd and what we think of as natural and logical are nothing but absurdisms that we use to create meaning in our lives. The Bald Soprano was first staged on May 11, 1950 by Nicolas Bataille in Paris at the Noctambules theatre. The play became famous through the support of a few known French writers and critics such as Jean Anouilh and Jacques Lemerchand and soon Ionesco found himself at the center of renown and an established playwright at 45.
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