The Bald Soprano

I personally would like to bring a tortoise on to the stage, turn it into a race horse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon, and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre, and it is the place where one dares the least. I want no other limits than the technical limits of stage machinery. People will say that my plays are music-hall turns or circus acts. So much the better – let’s include the circus in the theatre! Let the playwright be accused of being arbitrary. Yes, the theatre is the place where one can be arbitrary. As a matter of fact, it is not arbitrary. The imagination is not arbitrary, it is revealing. …I have decided not to recognize any laws except those of my imagination, and since the imagination obeys its own laws, this is further proof that in the last resort it is not arbitrary.

— “Eugène Ionesco ouvre le feu” (with parallel English translation),
World Theatre, Paris, vol. VIII, no. 3, Autumn 1959

The Man Behind the Curtain

Born in Romania in 1909, young Ionesco was son of a French mother, Thérèse Ipcar, and a Romanian father, named Eugen Ionescu (Romanian spelling), who moved his wife and two-year-old son from Romania to Paris for his pursuit of a Doctorate of Law. Shortly after, Ionesco’s sister Marilina was born. Four years later, their father returned to Bucharest to fight in World War I, while the family remained in Paris. They lost contact with the father and believed him to be killed in action, when in fact, back in Romania, he had claimed his wife’s desertion of their home and divorced her in absentia, remarrying in 1917 without informing his family. In 1918, the 8-year-old Ionesco and his sister lived with their mother, whom he adored, in a modest hotel on rue Blomet in the 15^th district of Paris. For fear of bombing raids (or due to a developing anemia in Ionesco, according to Martin Esslin, author of The Theatre of the Absurd), Thérèse had the children moved for some months to the countryside of Northwestern France, which Ionesco would later claim to be among the happiest times in his childhood. In 1922, father Eugen demanded that his children be sent to him and his new wife, and the reluctant 13-year-old Ionesco left his mother for Bucharest. Thérèse would later follow and take in his sister, who was driven out by his stepmother. Ionesco learned Romanian to enter lycée (high school).

Ionesco did not get along with his father or his stepmother, always having harbored a deep resentment towards his father for his deception and cowardliness. He eventually moved out of his father’s home in 1926. Even from a young age, Ionesco disapproved of his father’s falseness in siding with whatever regime was in power, especially with the rising fascist regime in Romania. Around this time, Ionesco discovered the work of fellow Romanian Tristan Tzara, the father of Dadaism, a nihilistic literary and artistic movement rejecting convention and exploring life & art through irrationality, the bizarre, disintegration of language; etc. Ionesco was studying French Literature at the University of Bucharest and began his career as a budding literary critic and poet. He wrote avant-garde essays and poems for literary reviews, most notably a collection of controversial essays attacking the best of Romanian literati, entitled Nu (1934; No). Two years later, he married Rodica Burileanu, and soon after, lost his mother to a stroke. While teaching French at the lycée in Bucharest, he received a State grant to write his doctorate on “Sin and Death in French Poetry” in Paris, beginning in 1939. During World War II, in 1942, they moved to Marseilles as poor refugees, spending those years of the German occupation in hiding. Two years later, their only daughter Marie-France was born, on the very day of France’s liberation. Now that France was free from the occupation, Ionesco, his wife, and daughter moved permanently to Paris in 1945. His father Eugen died in 1948. That same year, Ionesco became a French citizen and wrote his first play, the first version of The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve) in Romanian under a title meaning English without a Teacher, next writing the version in French that we have today.

Once Ionesco began writing plays, it took almost a decade for him to get full recognition from critics and audiences, as this ‘new theatre’ was quite shocking and different for audiences of the day. But there was no denying Ionesco’s mastery, thanks to the enthusiasm of fellow writers and proclamations of critics such as Jacques Lemarchand, first writing for Combat then Le Figaro Littéraire, (who unlike his fellow critics praised Ionesco from the start). Lemarchand was one of Ionesco’s most loyal supporters, revealed aptly in his review of Victims of Duty (Victimes du devoir) in its premiere in early 1953. His words can be applied to all Ionesco plays: “It seems to me that with this play Mr. Ionesco has come closer than he ever did before to bringing his dramaturgy in line with his vision.… For me, it is a theater of adventure, the inner adventure of the mind…. He is able both to wring our hearts making us shed tears and to have us collapse with laughter” (Translated by Ionesco scholar Rosette Lamont). Ionesco, a stranger in his homeland and foreigner in a recently liberated nation, finally found an acceptance for his new form of theatre. Lamont lists some of the finest features of Ionesco’s plays: “the underlying seriousness, the poetic power of his astonishing stage images rising from the depths of his subconscious, and the liberating effect of his anarchic humor.” (Lamont, Ionesco’s Imperatives, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993)

Ionesco’s Plays

Victims of Duty , produced at The Cutting Ball last October, is one of many Ionesco plays that explore his relationships with his parents and reflect memories of his childhood. Lamont calls him “the eternal wanderer, interrogating the world, and plumbing his own psyche” (Lamont, Ionesco’s Imperatives). Ionesco perhaps unknowingly describes himself in 1958: “It is the dreamer, the thinker or the scientist who is the revolutionary; it is he who tries to change the world.”

Ionesco authored 28 plays, many of which have been produced several times over. Victims of Duty was written in 1952, a mere four years after he began playwriting. It is his first confessional dream play, (and first of many autobiographical plays), one in which he “tried to sink comedy in tragedy… to confront comedy and tragedy in order to link them in [their natural] co-existence.” Ionesco’s first play The Bald Soprano is subtitled Anti-play, whereas Victims’ subtitle is Pseudo-drama, or false drama: “I have called my comedies ‘anti-plays’ or ‘comic dramas’, and my dramas ‘pseudo-dramas’ or ‘tragic farces’: for it seems to me that comic and tragic are one, and that the tragedy of man is pure derision” (Ionesco, 1958). Lamont calls Victims a “personal drama; on one level, it is a bold public confession enclosed in the form of self-psychoanalysis, while on the other, it constitutes a lucid meditation on the vagaries of contemporary European history.” She calls Ionesco “an artist who celebrates the childlike wonder of constant renewal and fresh discoveries,” much like the activity of the characters in The Bald Soprano.

The Bald Soprano

Ionesco likes to say that his first play The Bald Soprano happened almost “by accident.” Little did he know that this one-act comedy would “set into motion the mechanism of a new genre, the tragic farce,” or “metaphysical farce” (Lamont). In 1948 at the age of 38, while learning conversational English from his Assimil textbook L’Anglais sans peine, (meaning English without pain but translated as English Made Easy), Ionesco literally found the absurd in the fictional English characters of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” who used everyday niceties and overly simplistic truths to teach the reader the English language. All six characters from his textbook and their meaningless phrases landed on the pages of his “Anti-play” The Bald Soprano. Although they are English characters with some very English statements, Ionesco denies that the play is a satire of the English, rather that it is: “above all about a kind of universal petite bourgeoisie…a man of fixed ideals and slogans, a ubiquitous conformist… [a] conformism revealed by the mechanical language.” He has also stated that had he been attempting to learn Italian, Russian or Turkish at the time of writing the play, the play would have been about couples living in Italy, Russia, or Turkey (Ionesco, 1958). In our production of a new translation by Rob Melrose, we keep all original references of the English characters and their lives, but we do not use English accents in an effort to honor Ionesco’s original intention.

The original title of the play, English Made Easy (probably named after his English textbook), and later The English Hour, was changed to The Bald Soprano, or La Cantatrice chauve, due to a happy accident when the actor playing The Fire Captain stumbled with his lines by saying: “une cantatrice chauve” (a bald soprano) rather than “une institutrice blonde” (a blond schoolteacher). The premiere of The Bald Soprano in 1950 had only 25 performances, and a 1952 remount in another theatre with his second play The Lesson, or La Leçon, ran for six months. But it was the revival of both in 1957 that has broken world records. Under the title Le Spectacle Ionesco, The Bald Soprano playing with The Lesson, has run continuously since 1957 at the 95-seat Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris—over 16,300 performances and counting.

Whether The Cutting Ball production makes history on this continent in our 70-seat theatre, as was done with the production in Paris, only time will tell. What we hope is to honor the legacy of a great artist in bringing to life, simply told, one of our favorite plays.

©2009 Nakissa C. Etemad