Theatre can be the metamorphosis of reality, attempting to comprehend the discomfort, the doubts and the desperation that lacerate the soul of modern man.
One way to do that is to break the rules and create paradoxical, nonsensical situations that play on the fears and anxieties of daily life. It’s like pointing a light on someone who is groping for a handhold to avoid drowning, or falling from a cliff and reliving the most significant moments of a life about to end.
These images come to mind when considering the poetics of the plays by Eugène Ionesco.
Born in Bucarest in 1912 of a Romanian father and a French mother, in 1940 he moved to Paris, where he had spent some time as a child. In the course of what might be called a preparatory decade, Ionesco decided that his theatre would represent apparent middle-class normality occasionally giving way to absurd, borderline situations emerging from the folly that can be found in any human being. His task, as a playwright, was to create highly ambiguous, surreal atmospheres exploring the realm of metaphysics, where the events of reality can hardly fit in.

His characters can be seen as doubles of the author, who remains aside, manoeuvring parts of himself like some unknown puppeteer. In 1950, at the Théatre des Noctambules, Ionesco presented his first work, The Bald Soprano, a one-act play in eleven scenes, which he defined an “antiplay”, characterized by intense surrealism particularly in the dialogues. Ionesco always denied that this play was a satire against the English and their foibles, but the famous introduction is aimed directly at Her Majesty’s subjects:
“A middle-class English interior, with English armchairs. An English evening. Mr. Smith, an Englishman, seated in his English armchair and wearing English slippers, is smoking his English pipe and reading an English newspaper, near an English fire. He is wearing English spectacles and a small gray English mustache. Beside him, in another English armchair, Mrs. Smith, an Englishwoman, is darning some English socks. A long moment of English silence. The English clock strikes 17 English strokes”. Just fifteen years later Ionesco said that he believed The Bald Soprano no longer belonged to him, since the play had been adopted by comedy theatres around the world, translated and represented in hundreds of places.

At the Théatre de La Huchette, in Paris, the play has been showing since 1957 and can still be seen today after 45 years.

The story starts with a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, sitting in their living room and speaking in the sort of sentences found in English phrase books. The maid, Mary, suddenly announces the visit of Mr. and Mrs. Martin, who enter and sit down facing each other, engaged in what appears to be a conversation between strangers. After a good deal of talking they realize, from the many circumstances mentioned, that they live together.
At this point the pace becomes pressing and the conversation even more paradoxical. A fireman arrives on the scene, looking for a fire to put out. At his departure, the four start screaming and menacing each other, while uttering meaningless phrases and isolated vowels and consonants. Suddenly darkness falls. When the lights come on, we find the Martins sitting in the Smiths’ place, and, as in the beginning, they repeat the same lines of the couple they replaced.

Traslated by Interpres sas