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Summary: The paradox of tragedy
Review: I am directing the Bald Soprano soon. One of my major battles has been this: How do I translate Ionesco's ideas to my audience. Ionesco did not write his seemingly meaningless text to be a funny piece of sensless fluff. Ionesco saw in his work a profound meaning with deep implications. He shows us six people, whose interactions with each other are completely absurd and meaningless. The characters speak to each other in endless non-sequinters and cliches. They cannot communicate with one another. Their inablity to communicate unltimatally leads to conflict and the end, not only of the play, but of the lives of these characters (made alive only as long as the play lasts) the audience laughs at this. They look at these characters on the stage and think, "What aweful people they are." What they don't realize is that they are laughing at themselves. It is infact they who scurry about the earth speaking to one another with meaningless words, and in cliches. They are trapped in a world of political correctness, and useless sayings. They don't communicate, but say only what they are expected to say. They fight about things that have no eternal significance, and they fight until it is impossible for either side to win. The Bald Soprano shows us ourselves. The tragedy of the Bald Soprano is that we laugh at it, because we except that our relationships and indeed our existance is laughable. The tragedy is that we don't even know that we are laughing at ourselves, because we are blind to our own faults. WE don't allow ourselves to see that we are talking without speaking, and fighting without winning. The difficulty to the director is: How do we make the audience see Ionesco's point. If we made it completely obvious, than it would lose it's comic value, for who could laugh if they knew how desperate their circumstance was. And if they don't laugh, than the play loses it's tragedy. It would be simple if Ionesco had given us some text at the end to wrap it up, and tell the audience the meaning. But Ionesco didn't see the need to. To him, it was not possible for humanity to change. Even if he had made the audience understand that the characters were showing them themselves, they would not have been willing to change. To IOnesco, the world was headed on a downward spiral, so we night as well laugh about it, even if it is at our own expense.
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Summary: A note to high-school theatre directors
Review: I had the good fortune/misfortune to be a high school theatre teacher in a small town in North Carolina for two years. The most rewarding experience I had was letting a junior/senior cast loose with a script of The Bald Soprano. They had a ball and so did I. It was entirely liberating. They took it where they wanted to, which is Ionesco's point I think. Ionesco embodies this freedom. His scripts are not roadmaps, pointing to what an actor should think or feel. It is not as if he is providing a "fill in the blanks" master plan. The director and the actors are free to provide their own interpretation. Freedom of expression is boundless. I was really pleasantly surprised by the direction my students took on their own accord. I essentially just sat back and watched the play unfold.
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Summary: Like a fine wine it get's better with time
Review: I have to admit the first time I read this in its original french I was irritated. It really rubbed me the wrong way. I was in high school, and being an absurdist or understanding an absurdist was the last thing on my mind. The angst ridden teenager relies more heavily on angst ridden realism. But I read it again, and again, and again and again. And now I love it. It's so drop your pants sarcastically funny and depressing that some how I feel I should have discovered it when I was a sardonic little twerp of a teen. Social commentary coming out the wazoo, but you can make it as light as you want. I love it!
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Summary: HILARIOUS
Review: I just finished being in a production of The Bald Soprano as Mrs. Martin. The best show I've ever been in. This script is amazing - every rehearsal the cast would be laughing until we all had tears in our eyes at the humor we found in this "anti-play". Absolutely brilliant - do yourself a favor and pick up this book.
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Summary: What a great play!
Review: I recently read the play for a fourth-year French class I'm currently enrolled in. It was one of the best experiences I've had with literature in a long time. The wonderful thing about Ionesco is that it works on two levels. It can be interpreted as a serious, absurdist work about the meaninglessness of conversation and much of human existence. Or, if you want, it can be read as a hilariously funny piece of absurdist theatre with plenty of quotable lines to drop into any conversation. (Favorites for this include the Fire Chief's "fables" and the final scene. Go nuts.)I would recommend, though, that you read this in French if possible. I picked up the English translation after reading the French original and was so frustrated by the translation I threw it down on the floor of the bookstore. If you must, English is okay, but the true fun is reading in the original language.
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Summary: The Best of absurd theater !!!!
Review: Ionesco's "la cantantrice chauve" (the Bald Soprano ) is one of absourd theater classic plays. It is a play that everybody who is interested in theater should read. with increadable characters and a unvilivable script, the Bald singer inmortalized Ionesco
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Summary: HILARIOUS
Review: These four one-act plays of bleak absurdity and startling originality place Ionesco alongside Beckett and Pinter as one of twentieth century theater's most enigmatic iconoclasts. "The Bald Soprano" begins as a seemingly placid comedy on proper English manners, but then weird things happen -- irregular clock chimes, contradictions with no logical basis, non-sequiturs -- which build to a crescendo of chaos like a dissonant string quartet. Corrupting every convention of traditional drama, defying every expectation of the audience, it is exactly the "anti-play" its subtitle suggests. In "The Lesson," an aging professor's excessive zeal for a particular subject, made incomprehensibly esoteric by his own obsessive study of it, is the downfall of many a hapless student. "Jack" is the age-old story of a boy who disappoints his family by not wanting to marry the girl they have selected for him, but, like a surrealist painting, the proceedings are rendered grotesque by nonsensical lines and colors. As though to accentuate the banality of the underlying plot, the actors go to dramatic extremes as if they were acting out a "real" drama. But I feel that the most engaging of the four plays is "The Chairs," in which two actors not only must play a nonagenarian couple hosting a roomful of people who have assembled for a lecture, but must pantomime the presence of the (invisible) guests. The bitterly ironic (and very funny) "lecture" given at the end affirms MacBeth's notion that life truly is a tale told by an idiot. I think these plays are more about form than content, as Ionesco is experimenting with visual and verbal imagery and challenging the audience's sense of comfort with the theater, intending to evoke unusual and unpleasant emotions like awkwardness or embarrassment. To get the most out of reading the plays, it is best not to read them as literature but to visualize them being performed, paying close attention to every detail in the stage directions and the instructed mannerisms of the characters.
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Summary: The Bald Soprano: a lesson in futility
Review: This book, being one of Ionesco's greatest, is without a doubt the epitome of the Theatre of the Absurd. I read this in a college french class of mine a few years ago and loved it. One warning for those who are unaccustomed to the tenets of this genre: this book does not make sense to the normal mind! nor does it intend to. The lesson this book teaches us is about the extent to which we take our language, and the reality behind it. Ionesco shows us, with alarming ease, that our language as we know it is useless, and ends up leading us in nothing but circles. Futility is a very crucial theme for this type of literature, and it is expressed by Ionesco wonderfully. If you'd like to try something with "a little more to it" , so to speak, Jean-Paul Sartre is a good place to start. Enjoy this book, this genre, and the lessons they provide.
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Summary: absurdity at its best
Review: This play offers entertainment at two levels. The first is the outward, ridiculous humor-the humor from the spontaneity of the characters and there seemingly nonsensical actions. The second humor is a deeper one that can be found by examining the phrases Ionesco uses. They seem to be random and pure nonsense, but they actually seem to come from a method of learning English. When taken out of context they can be put together in very funny ways. All-in-all, the book really made me laugh, but it also makes you think about the absurdity of what you may be saying when you talk to friends, or what you hear on the radio. I strongly suggest you give this book a try.
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Summary: One of the Masters of Drama
Review: Though Beckett is usually given the title of THE master of the Theater of the Absurd, in many respects, Ionesco's Bald Soprano encompasses all the revelant themes of the genre. Ionesco, through his black humor, psychological insight, use of language, and pragmatic critic of metaphysics, stands as one of the foremost playwrights of the past century. Recommended.
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