Home > The Bald Soprano Summary & Study Guide

The Bald Soprano | Introduction

In 1948, Eugene Ionesco began writing The Bald Soprano, as he later confessed, almost in spite of himself, for by that time he had come to despise the theater that he had much loved in his youth. What did intrigue him was the banality of the expressions used in an English-language phrase book. These phrases were the inspiration for this anti-play or parody, "a comedy of comedies." Although he set out to show how human discourse had devolved into a collection of empty platitudes and self-evident truisms, something that he believed was very distressing, his friends found his play very amusing, and they encouraged him to find a theater that would stage it. One of these friends, Monique Saint-Come, showed the work to Nicolas Bataille, the director of a group of avant-garde actors working in Paris.

It was under Bataille's direction that La Cantatrice chauve was first produced in French at the Theatre des Noctambules in Paris on May 11, 1950. In rehearsal, the company had first tried staging the play as parody but had soon discovered that it worked best if presented as wholly serious drama, in the realistic mode of Ibsen. They had also experimented, trying several different endings, for example. Essentially, even after it opened, La Cantatrice chauve remained a work in progress.

The first staging was poorly received. Only the dramatist Armand Salacrou and the critic Jacques Lemarchand praised it. However, the negative responses mattered little to Ionesco, who "suddenly … realized that it was his destiny to write for the theatre." He began a series of "anti-plays" that within a decade established his place in the new-French theater, the group of avant-garde playwrights that included Samuel Beckett Arthur Adamov, and Jean Genet. In the 1950s, La Cantatrice chauve was translated into various languages and widely staged; by 1960, in the United States, where it had been translated and produced as The Bald Soprano, it was already being recognized as a modern classic, an important seminal work in the theater of the absurd, which by then was first coming into vogue in America.

The Bald Soprano Summary

The Bald Soprano, a one-act "anti-play,'' opens in a "middle-class English" interior, furnished with typically English furniture and a typically English couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, whose first names remain unknown. It is an English evening, and the pair is engaged in English activities. He reads a newspaper while she darns socks. The silence is broken by an English clock that strikes seventeen times, prompting Mrs. Smith to remark that "it's nine o'clock."

Mrs. Smith recounts what the pair had for dinner, mentally wandering from the menu to the pair's children while Mr. Smith continues to read and click his tongue. He finally responds when she concludes that one Dr. MacKenzie-King was to be trusted because he underwent a liver operation before performing the same operation on a patient. They start a mild quarrel over the issue because the doctor's patient died, prompting Mr. Smith to conclude that the doctor was not conscientious.

After the clock strikes seven times, then three more times, Mr. Smith announces that Bobby Watson has died, something, presumably, that he has learned from the newspaper's obituaries. In the ensuing dialogue, the couple disclose that Bobby Watson was married to Bobby Watson, and, further, that there is whole clan of Bobby Watsons. Threaded through the Watson discussion are several inconsistencies and contradictions, so it is never clear, for example, whether the first named Bobby Watson had died recently, or one, or two, or three, or even four years before.

The discussion leads into a brief altercation. Mr. Smith accuses his wife of asking "idiotic questions," while she complains that men do nothing but sit around smoking and either powdering their noses and putting rouge on their lips or drinking heavily. Mr. Smith, apparently deaf to what Mrs. Smith has just said, asks her what she would say if she saw men behaving like women, powdering their noses, using rouge on their lips, and consuming whiskey. When Mrs. Smith complains about his kind of joking, and in a snit throws socks across the room, Mr. Smith tries to placate his "little ducky daddies" with a suggestion that they turn off the lights and "go bye-byes."

Mary enters to explain that she is the maid and has just spent the afternoon with a male companion, and, further, that the guests, the Martins, have arrived. After complaining that Mary should not have gone out, the Smiths leave to dress while Mary greets the... » Complete The Bald Soprano Summary