The Bald Soprano Review

The Bald Soprano Review

What to say about an 'anti-play'? For this is what Eugune Ionesco set out to create when he sat down to write The Bald Soprano, one of the seminal texts of the Theatre of the Absurd. Language is pivotal, yet speeches mean little or nothing. ‘Anti-logic' rules in this surreal parody of a dinner party.’

Absurdity is sovereign, and Sally Welch’s production certainly conjures adeptly with the futile, ridiculous world of the absurd. In The Bald Soprano, this has been done principally through stressing the comic aspects of the play. Ionesco drew his inspiration from an English language manual, whose characters, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, receive their friends Mr. and Mrs. Martin for dinner, filling the time with empty platitudes about the weather, living in the country, and catching colds.

The Smiths and the Martins of Ionesco's text, however, gradually become more and more faceless as language comes to dominate them. As a result, one could almost complain of too much character development here. As each couple