At the time Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano, serious French theater was under the domination of writers who wrote very literate plays with serious, intellectual themes. Among them were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus who, although they shared a philosophical kinship with Ionesco, chose to write in a traditional mode There were a few dissenters, particularly Antonin Artaud. In The Theatre and Its Double (1938), he had clamored for something new, an overpowering drama that would have an impact analogous to that of the Black Death on medieval Europe. Few outside small avant-garde circles listened, however, and the new theatrical revolution preached by Artaud, which Ionesco's anti-play helped promote, began far less dramatically than Artaud had hoped. On May 11, 1950, The Bald Soprano opened before an audience of three people who sat under a leaky roof at the dilapidated Theatre des Noctambules on Paris's Left Bank.

The audience never grew very large during the play's brief run. The work was simply too different for the established tastes of most patrons, some of whom hooted indignantly, outraged by the audacity of the piece. To them and most reviewers, The Bald Soprano was contrary to the very idea of theater. Few saw any merit in the play, and despite the cast and playwright's energetic efforts to drum up new audiences, the house soon went dark from lack of interest.

The chilling reception of The Bald Soprano did not discourage Ionesco, however. His fascination with theater rekindled, he continued writing his series of anti-plays, undeterred by the hostile or indifferent welcome of his early French audiences. The reactions even seemed to support the implications of his play, that the bourgeoisie was incapable of fresh judgments. It was the very discomfort of Ionesco's audiences that amused an early supporter, the French critic Jacques Lemarchand, who, in his "Preface to Eugene Ionesco," confessed that he found great pleasure in the "insults" and "grunts and ironic laughter of the notables in the audience."

Because he shared their distrust of rationalism, Ionesco won immediate approval by some surrealists, including the playwright Armand Salacrou, one of the three members of the play's first audience. However, it took the support of establishment critics and writers to break through the barrier of public aversion. The tide of public opinion really began to turn in 1954 with the revival of Ionesco's third produced play, The Chairs. It had played to sparse audiences m 1952, when it was first produced, and though it prompted a serious defense in the magazine, Arts, it fared little better than The Bald Soprano had two years earlier. However, the revival became a significant success when France's premier dramatist Jean Anouilh openly deemed it a masterpiece, a classic in the avant-garde theater. Ionesco soon found a niche in the front rank of the new French playwrights, some of whom, like him, were expatriates living in Paris, notably Samuel Beckett and Arthur Adamov.

There were those who complained that Ionesco's anti-plays advanced no causes, that the playwright lacked the kind of political commitment of dramatists like Bertolt Brecht. A major controversy arose after, in translation, Ionesco's plays made their way onto the British stage, starting with The Bald Soprano in November, 1956. Within two years, the so-called "London Controversy" started when an extremely influential leftist critic and early defender of Ionesco, Kenneth Tynan, began a celebrated debate with the playwright over what Tynan believed was Ionesco's linguistic nihilism, his distrust of language as a viable tool for human advancement. Several important persons were eventually drawn into the controversy, including Philip Toynbee and Orson Welles. In...