Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

I sort of grew up with Ionesco. This crazy Romanian turned Frenchman with his absurd stage plays, the Bald Soprano and stuff like that, was synonym for art trash in yahoo speak. He wrote like abstract painters painted. Good honest citizens detested that kind of stuff and complained when theatres and museums who were subsidized by public funds played or diplayed it. Ionesco was the equivalent of Picasso in my home town red neck cultural perspective. (Please note that I am German, not Kentuckian.
Apologies to Kentucky, should I have said Oklahoma? Anyway, German backwoods are no different.)
Then I take a big leap with the time machine. No encounters with Ionesco since maybe the 60s. Plenty with Picasso though, who became one of my heroes (and one of my favorite writers, P. O'Brian, wrote a good biography, which I reviewed here, but I pulled the review out since nobody was interested).
And now my daughter, who is doing her IB with drama as elective subject, chose The Lesson for her graduation stage production. I read it first and told her she is crazy. Nobody can play this mad professor who kills his private students after endless absurd monologues on philology (which leads to calamity, as the maid says). As any self-respecting 18 year old would, she ignored my ignorant advice and did it anyway. She found a fantastic actress to do the mad old professor, a 16 year old American Chinese girl who must have been born for this part. And perfect fits for the pupil and the maid as well.
I have not had so much fun in a theatre for a long time. Hail to old Ionesco! And kudos to the producer and director of the play on this day!

This book, being one of Ionesco's greatest, is without a doubt the epitome of the Theatre of the Absurd. I read this in a college french class of mine a few years ago and loved it. One warning for those who are unaccustomed to the tenets of this genre: this book does not make sense to the normal mind! nor does it intend to. The lesson this book teaches us is about the extent to which we take our language, and the reality behind it. Ionesco shows us, with alarming ease, that our language as we know it is useless, and ends up leading us in nothing but circles. Futility is a very crucial theme for this type of literature, and it is expressed by Ionesco wonderfully. If you'd like to try something with "a little more to it" , so to speak, Jean-Paul Sartre is a good place to start. Enjoy this book, this genre, and the lessons they provide.

I've seen The Bald Soprano and The Chairs performed, and it has been on my list for quite a while to read them both. The other two plays in the volume I saw as a kind of bonus.

The Chairs is the gem in the book. It was just as wonderful to read as it was to see. Ionesco and his feel for the absurdities in language is always charming, but the Chairs combines that sense of fun and the absurd with some very real pathos.

I was not familiar with Jack, and was glad to have a chance to read it. The bride with three noses and the absurd Grandmother and Grandfather Jack are wonderful characters-- I look forward to having an opportunity to see this staged.

Essential reading for people with an interest in the Theater of the Absurd.

I just finished being in a production of The Bald Soprano as Mrs. Martin. The best show I've ever been in. This script is amazing - every rehearsal the cast would be laughing until we all had tears in our eyes at the humor we found in this "anti-play". Absolutely brilliant - do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

I have to admit the first time I read this in its original french I was irritated. It really rubbed me the wrong way. I was in high school, and being an absurdist or understanding an absurdist was the last thing on my mind. The angst ridden teenager relies more heavily on angst ridden realism. But I read it again, and again, and again and again. And now I love it. It's so drop your pants sarcastically funny and depressing that some how I feel I should have discovered it when I was a sardonic little twerp of a teen. Social commentary coming out the wazoo, but you can make it as light as you want. I love it!

This play offers entertainment at two levels. The first is the outward, ridiculous humor-the humor from the spontaneity of the characters and there seemingly nonsensical actions. The second humor is a deeper one that can be found by examining the phrases Ionesco uses. They seem to be random and pure nonsense, but they actually seem to come from a method of learning English. When taken out of context they can be put together in very funny ways. All-in-all, the book really made me laugh, but it also makes you think about the absurdity of what you may be saying when you talk to friends, or what you hear on the radio. I strongly suggest you give this book a try.

...even more than Rhinoceros did. Ionesco is witty, absurd, in wonderfully bad taste, and there are few social conventions he leaves untouched. it left me wondering which world was more insane...the one in the theatre, or the one in which i live. absolutely fantastic.