Four Plays: The Bald Soprano; The Lesson; Jack, or the Submission; The Chairs [Paperback]

Eugene Ionesco (Author), Donald M. Allen (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1982

The leading figure of absurdist theater and one of the great innovators of the modern stage, Eugene Ionesco did not write his first play, The Bald Soprano, until 1950. He went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Drama in 11 scenes by Eugene Ionesco, who called it an "antiplay." It was first produced in 1950 and published in 1954 as La Cantatrice chauve; the title is also translated The Bald Prima Donna. The play, an important example of the Theater of the Absurd, consists mainly of a series of meaningless conversations between two couples that eventually deteriorate into babbling. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802130798
• ISBN-13: 978-0802130792
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #78,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #34 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Drama > Continental European

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The paradox of tragedy, October 27, 2000

By 

JEFF SPRUILL (Searcy, AR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Four Plays: The Bald Soprano; The Lesson; Jack, or the Submission; The Chairs (Paperback)

I am directing the Bald Soprano soon. One of my major battles has been this: How do I translate Ionesco's ideas to my audience. Ionesco did not write his seemingly meaningless text to be a funny piece of sensless fluff. Ionesco saw in his work a profound meaning with deep implications. He shows us six people, whose interactions with each other are completely absurd and meaningless. The characters speak to each other in endless non-sequinters and cliches. They cannot communicate with one another. Their inablity to communicate unltimatally leads to conflict and the end, not only of the play, but of the lives of these characters (made alive only as long as the play lasts) the audience laughs at this. They look at these characters on the stage and think, "What aweful people they are." What they don't realize is that they are laughing at themselves. It is infact they who scurry about the earth speaking to one another with meaningless words, and in cliches. They are trapped in a world of political correctness, and useless sayings. They don't communicate, but say only what they are expected to say. They fight about things that have no eternal significance, and they fight until it is impossible for either side to win. The Bald Soprano shows us ourselves. The tragedy of the Bald Soprano is that we laugh at it, because we except that our relationships and indeed our existance is laughable. The tragedy is that we don't even know that we are laughing at ourselves, because we are blind to our own faults. WE don't allow ourselves to see that we are talking without speaking, and fighting without winning. The difficulty to the director is: How do we make the audience see Ionesco's point. If we made it completely obvious, than it would lose it's comic value, for who could laugh if they knew how desperate their circumstance was. And if they don't laugh, than the play loses it's tragedy. It would be simple if Ionesco had given us some text at the end to wrap it up, and tell the audience the meaning. But Ionesco didn't see the need to. To him, it was not possible for humanity to change. Even if he had made the audience understand that the characters were showing them themselves, they would not have been willing to change. To IOnesco, the world was headed on a downward spiral, so we night as well laugh about it, even if it is at our own expense.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ionesco!, July 27, 2006

By 

A. Smythe - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Four Plays: The Bald Soprano; The Lesson; Jack, or the Submission; The Chairs (Paperback)

As history tells us, the Frenchman (or rather, a Roumanian gentleman -- see comments below) Eugene Ionesco was learning English in the late 1940s when he was struck by the arbitrary nature of the sentences used to teach foreign language. ("I have a dog. His name is Spot. My name is Duncan.") Their nihilism and nonsensicality became the basis for his first play, La cantatrice chauve -- The Bald Soprano. People mostly love it or hate it; I love it. "Experience teaches us that when one hears the doorbell ring it is because there is never anyone there." This is definitely fun. Of Ionesco, I will always say: Worth a read.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative surrealist theater, March 25, 2002

By 

A.J. (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Four Plays: The Bald Soprano; The Lesson; Jack, or the Submission; The Chairs (Paperback)

These four one-act plays of bleak absurdity and startling originality place Ionesco alongside Beckett and Pinter as one of twentieth century theater's most enigmatic iconoclasts.

"The Bald Soprano" begins as a seemingly placid comedy on proper English manners, but then weird things happen -- irregular clock chimes, contradictions with no logical basis, non-sequiturs -- which build to a crescendo of chaos like a dissonant string quartet. Corrupting every convention of traditional drama, defying every expectation of the audience, it is exactly the "anti-play" its subtitle suggests.

In "The Lesson," an aging professor's excessive zeal for a particular subject, made incomprehensibly esoteric by his own obsessive study of it, is the downfall of many a hapless student.

"Jack" is the age-old story of a boy who disappoints his family by not wanting to marry the girl they have selected for him, but, like a surrealist painting, the proceedings are rendered grotesque by nonsensical lines and colors. As though to accentuate the banality of the underlying plot, the actors go to dramatic extremes as if they were acting out a "real" drama.

But I feel that the most engaging of the four plays is "The Chairs," in which two actors not only must play a nonagenarian couple hosting a roomful of people who have assembled for a lecture, but must pantomime the presence of the (invisible) guests. The bitterly ironic (and very funny) "lecture" given at the end affirms MacBeth's notion that life truly is a tale told by an idiot.

I think these plays are more about form than content, as Ionesco is experimenting with visual and verbal imagery and challenging the audience's sense of comfort with the theater, intending to evoke unusual and unpleasant emotions like awkwardness or embarrassment. To get the most out of reading the plays, it is best not to read them as literature but to visualize them being performed, paying close attention to every detail in the stage directions and the instructed mannerisms of the characters.