Bald Soprano
The playwright, Eugene Ionesco's , first play, La Cantatrice Chauve translated into The Bald Soprano in 1956 is considered to have founded the movement known as the theatre of the absurd and Ionesco himself has often been labelled the father of 'absurdities.' This particular play, which has upset all conventions, habits and destroyed theatre itself has often been termed an anti-play, because it attacked and ridiculed all conventions of drama, the theatre, logic, language as well as life. Eugene Ionesco constructed this play out of nonsensical sentences, which are used to portray the irrelevance of the daily life led by the British bourgeois society who are deeply rooted in their meaningless lives. All absurdist playwrights like Ionesco often ignored the logical structures of traditional dramatical theatre when writing their plays, which explains why Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, unlike other usual and non-absurdist plays, is basically about nothing. The characters portrayed, only capable of speaking in banal phrases and cliches are unable to communicate with each other. Lacking deep emotion or feeling of any kind, they often find themselves engaged in pointless chatter without ever really
15) Similar to the dialogue taking place between the character, the stage directions are contradictory, much like their words. 21-22) Furthermore, the play lacks structure; the author does not provide the reader with a detailed setting of the play or a very deep insight into the characters or their historical background. The middle and end sections of this play are similar in the sense that a circular routine-like quality emerges and becomes dominant in the style; the characters sit and talk, repeating obvious events until it all sounds like nonsense. Furthermore, not only are the characters interchangeable, but so are their sexes. With the characters eliminated, this basically leaves the absurdity of language acting as the primary 'character' throughout the work. Furthermore, even the notion of time is irrelevant, 'the clock strikes as much as it likes' (pg. 40) At this point, the play loses all meaning in general.
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