Die kahle Sängerin

Eugène Ionesco was very surprised that the audience laughed at his first play. He had actually wanted to write a "tragedy of language" with The Bald Singer: a petty bourgeois post-war society entrenched behind empty shells of language. The result was a play without meaning, but with a plot, which became a popular comedy in France.

In it, the Smith couple are caught up in a seemingly banal conversation, talking past each other and arguing about trivial matters until another couple, the Martins, come to visit. A conversation ensues that is complicated by amnesia: With embarrassed coughs, everyone tries to tell each other about the "events" of the day, getting lost in the fog of reality in search of the truth, which no one knows where it is hiding. With a fire marshal searching for fires all over town and the Smiths' maid, Mary, who is apparently also Sherlock Holmes. They all try to hide their pasts and wounds and increasingly lose their composure.

In 1950, The Bald Singer established the "theater of the absurd", which seeks to counter the world's lack of meaning and the disoriented people in it with grotesquely comic and unreal scenes.

Johan Simons' production examines Ionesco's play against the backdrop of its time of origin - a post-war society steeped in guilt, conscience, pain, love, wounds, dreams, speechlessness and repressed traumas.