The Bald Soprano

Ionesco's anti-play, where language itself comes apart over an English dinner party.

Specifications & Metrics

author

Eugène Ionesco

type

Absurdist farce

era

Theatre of the Absurd (1950)

language

French

setting

A middle-class English living room

source text

Ionesco's experience of language-assimilation textbooks

acts

1 act

Relative Scale in Plays

Core Principles & Analysis

• Premiered in 1950; it has played in Paris continuously for decades.
• Ionesco built it from the dead phrases of a foreign-language primer.
• The title character never appears — the joke that named the anti-play.

Sources

• Wikipedia: The Bald Soprano