• Rating:
I have always suspected that the label "Theatre of the Absurd" is nothing more than a typical bourgeois invention designed to protect against those who speak of truths.
A kind of unconditional reflex, a defensive strategy that allows distancing from all those works that lay bare what is normally dressed in clothing, if not formal, at least of decent ordinariness: emptiness.
In short, there are individuals who almost entirely embody the symbolism of the three famous monkeys, except that - unfortunately - one of the three speaks, and when it does, it talks nonsense.
Eugène Ionesco was a master - and one of the pioneers - of what some, with brutal schematism, have trivialized as "Theatre of the Absurd".
Reading "The Rhinoceros", one of his most important plays, we discover that behind the acrobatic allegory of that epidemic of "rhinoceritis" that was gradually transforming all humans into dull mammals with short sight, there was a quintessentially political message expressed with furious and desecrating symbolism.
If in Camus' "The Plague" totalitarianism was likened to a disease that inevitably spread throughout the people, and the "quality" of citizens was determined by how each responded to the catastrophe, Ionesco varied on the grotesque the same theme showing the effects that plagued those who - incapable of any kind of prophylaxis - compliantly accommodated the nefarious germs brought by History.
And the language, the symbolism, the events of the play were permeated by a comedy so furious and iconoclastic as to seem almost a theatrical transposition of the poetry of a Tristan Corbière, an extraordinary - albeit undeservedly forgotten - author of the "Yellow Loves" who first mocked the dogmas postulated by Baudelaire.
But I digress. Yes, because I would rather focus on "The Bald Soprano". The debut of Ionesco in dramaturgy and composed in 1950, this work appears as the formal and substantial manifesto of all his future theatre, and it is, in fact, a gigantic mockery of the most despised social category by our author: the middle bourgeoisie.
A typical bourgeois evening set in a typically bourgeois living room, two middle-aged bourgeois couples dressed in outfits that are the quintessence of bourgeoisie, bourgeois satiety seasoned with an endless bourgeois loop.
And that’s it.
"The Bald Soprano" speaks of emptiness.
This is precisely the ingenious idea of Ionesco, who, not by chance, defined this work "anti-comedy" in opposition to a "normal" comedic play where the narrative follows the line of a beginning-development-end sprinkled with witty remarks that various characters dispense along the way to charm the spectator.
Here you laugh, oh how you laugh, but by following a linguistic process through which Ionesco brings to a climax all that arsenal of clichés, idiosyncrasies, meaningless delusions, nervous tics, incongruities, and sordid approximations that substantiate the existence of the average bourgeois.
It's as if the gargantuan idiocy of Father Ubu were here spread on every character who, despite having nothing to say, talks continuously to fill the void of his existence. But, while Alfred Jarry's "puppet" was inserted in decidedly fairy-tale or pseudo-historical contexts, in "The Bald Soprano" what strikes at first glance is the contrast between a more than ever anonymous interior and a conversation pushed to a furious schizophrenic absurdity.
Ionesco abandons himself to a sort of cupio dissolvi staring at the bottomless abyss of human vacuity and empties the conversation of its ultimate justification: communication.
A similar process will be enacted a few years later by Beckett in "Waiting for Godot", but with some decisive differences: while Vladimir and Estragon are two "enlightened" individuals who - despite the vain and eternal wait - perfectly understand how inconclusive their conversation is, Ionesco's characters do nothing but talk to themselves, get angry with each other only to reconcile immediately and babble ax-cut sentences hoping to convince others of the correctness of their statements.
In short, they are people still convinced not only of being able to captivate others with their eloquence but also of being able to communicate through oral transmission what they have (or do not have) in their hearts. In reality, their diatribes and tirades serve only to overheat the environment in which they live and to contaminate with their mad outbursts even the household objects, where even the clock, perhaps obfuscated by so much foolishness, continues to chime but does so completely out of sync.
The crescendo conclusion of the play, that succession of lightning-fast responses unconnected to each other, that cacophonic bacchanal with all characters degraded to the status of mere sound reproducers, does nothing but put a pyrotechnic seal on one of the most anti-bourgeois works of the 20th century.
All this has been called "absurd", but - while knowing that such qualification should be linked to the concept of gratuitousness, the "absurdity of existence" so dear to Existentialism - I would say that the epithet does not completely hit the target. As for me - if I didn't disdain every type of label - I would speak of a "Theatre of Unmasking" that, through parodistic hyperboles, progressively reveals the most authentic essence of certain phenomena and modus vivendi. And all this, people like Charlie Chaplin, for example, knew very well.
Ah, perhaps you are wondering why that title. Why "The Bald Soprano"?
It's simply a false trail, one of the many delusions taken from an exchange of lines in the play:
"How is the bald soprano?".
"She always combs her hair in the same way!".
In fact, that prankster Ionesco had the good taste of sparing no one in his works, not even himself.
Loading comments slowly
