Question 1

Who is the Bald Soprano?

Accepted Answer

The Bald Soprano is never mentioned in the play until the Fire Chief, who has arrived to check on fires, is asked — as he is leaving — how the Bald Soprano is. He says she still wears the same hair-style. That is the only mention. Ionesco chose the title because a student in the first rehearsal misread a line ('the blond teacher' became 'the bald soprano') and the misread phrase was more striking than the original; the title names something that is simultaneously never defined, never seen, and never relevant — perfectly embodying the play's theme of signifiers without referents.

Question 2

What is the Theatre of the Absurd?

Accepted Answer

The Theatre of the Absurd is the label given by critic Martin Esslin (in his 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd) to a group of plays from the 1950s and early 1960s — by Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, Genet, and Pinter — that share certain formal and thematic characteristics: plots without conventional cause and effect, language that fails to communicate or communicates the impossibility of communication, characters who cannot change or escape their situation, and a central concern with the meaninglessness of human existence. The label was adopted after the fact; Ionesco and Beckett did not call themselves absurdists (Ionesco preferred 'anti-theatre').

Question 3

What is Ionesco satirizing in La Cantatrice chauve?

Accepted Answer

The immediate satirical target is the English phrase-book Ionesco was using to learn English — a method that taught phrases ('The floor is below. The ceiling is above. London is in England.') that were grammatically correct but semantically vacuous: they described states of affairs so obvious that stating them was meaningless. But Ionesco's satire quickly extends to bourgeois social conversation in general: the polite exchanges between the Smiths and the Martins are the normal conversations of respectable middle-class couples, and the play's discovery is that normal social conversation is as meaningless as the phrase-book — that it serves a social function but communicates nothing real about the inner life of the speakers.

Question 4

How does La Cantatrice chauve end?

Accepted Answer

The ending is deliberately circular and therefore open — the play ends with the Martins beginning to repeat (with slight variations) the conversation that the Smiths had at the beginning of the play. In the original 1950 production Ionesco proposed several endings: the lights come up on an identical scene, or the audience is insulted, or the play begins again from the beginning. The circular ending is the most commonly performed, showing that the absurdist dynamic is eternal and cannot be resolved — the play does not end, it repeats. At the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris, where it has run continuously since 1957, the circular ending is performed and then followed immediately by La Leçon.

Question 5

Is Ionesco Romanian?

Accepted Answer

Yes — Eugène Ionesco was born in 1909 in Slatina, Romania, to a Romanian father and a French mother, and spent his early childhood in France before returning to Romania. He lived in Romania through the 1920s and 1930s, witnessing the rise of Romanian fascism at close hand (the experience shaped his later play Rhinocéros), and came to Paris in 1938. He wrote all his plays in French and is considered a French playwright, though his outsider's perspective on French and English bourgeois conventions is partly what gives La Cantatrice chauve its particular quality: the phrase-book exercises he was satirizing looked more absurd from the outside.

La Cantatrice chauve Reading Order

Complete La Cantatrice chauve Book List