The Bald Soprano Study Guide

Eugène Ionesco was born Eugen Ionescu in Slatina, Romania, in 1909 and brought up as an Orthodox Christian. He spent much of his childhood in France, where his mother had roots. As a young man, he moved back and forth between Romania and France, working on a doctoral degree and writing articles for Romanian publications. He settled permanently in France in the late 1930s, but it was not until a decade later that he had his major breakthrough with The Bald Soprano (first performed in 1950). He wrote several more one-act plays in the same absurdist vein throughout the 1950s, gaining a modest reputation. His reputation increased at the end of the decade with his foray into longer and more ambitious plays like The Killers (1958) and Rhinoceros (1959). Ionesco, along with playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, came to be championed as a pioneer of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” in which traditional dramatic conventions were violently undermined in order to convey the randomness and absurdity of humanity’s existence in the contemporary world. Ionesco was elected to the Académie Française in 1970, and he remained engaged with the theater until his death in 1994.

The Bald Soprano reflects the catastrophic events that had transpired in Europe in the preceding decade. Structurally, the drama’s descent into a chaotic inferno and its vision of the universe as hopelessly absurd and meaningless grew out of Ionesco’s experience of the horrors of World War II. Ionesco managed to get out of France and back to Romania in 1939, as the war was beginning to sweep through western Europe, but in 1942, for reasons not fully understood, he changed his mind and returned to France, which by this point was under the control of the Nazi-aligned Vichy government. Scholars have speculated that Ionescu’s mother had Jewish roots, which, if true, would have meant a life of fear and secrecy for Ionescu during these years. He lived from 1942 to 1944 in Marseille, which suffered numerous Allied bombing raids in that period. He then moved to Paris at the end of the war. His play allegorizes his impression of the war years, in which the thin veneer of bourgeois civilization was stripped off to reveal a world of senseless violence.

The Bald Soprano is Ionesco’s first play, and he followed it with several other one-act plays featuring similarly surreal events and structures, including The Lesson (1951) and The Chairs (1952). Rhinoceros (1959) is probably his best-known work, a longer and more ambitious play that retains his penchant for surrealism but develops a more sustained critique of the rise of fascism and Nazism. In 1960, the critic Martin Esslin published an essay, “The Theatre of the Absurd,” which identified a new genre of Absurdist drama in the recent works of Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Jean Genet. Beckett’s most famous work in this mode is Waiting for Godot (1953), which similarly pits its characters against a hopeless and meaningless universe. Among Genet’s best-known works is The Balcony (1957), which like Rhinoceros addresses geopolitical events through absurdist techniques. Adamov’s plays include Parody (1947), in which a handless clock looms over its characters. The work of Ionesco and this cohort influenced the British playwright Harold Pinter, particularly in his early plays like The Birthday Party (1957), which like The Bald Soprano features a descent into riotous nonsense speech.