Die kahle Sängerin

Translated from the French by Serge Stauffer

The title may take some getting used to, but the content certainly does not. Ionesco's "Anti-Play" from 1948, which ignores all the rules of theater that had been in force up to that time and in which not only a wall clock goes crazy, is considered the founding document of the Theatre of the Absurd, which became famous in the 1950s through Samuel Beckett and others. Created as a reaction to the horrors of the Nazi era and World War II, Absurdist theater postulates meaninglessness in form and content as the only meaningful state of existence. The result of this deeply melancholic stocktaking is, however, highly enjoyable in Ionesco's work: bizarre characters in humorous situations make for turgid theater, in which bizarre dialogues escalate into a fireworks display of meaningless phrases and nonsense sentences.

The plot - if you can call what happens that - is quickly summarized: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who are tremendously bored with each other after dinner, get a visit from a married couple who are friends, and when they make their appearance they first have to clarify whether they know each other. In the end, the two are delighted to discover that they sleep in the same bed, are married and have a child. The evening entertainment for the four of them, on the other hand, gets stranger and stranger: the maid Mary believes she is Sherlock Holmes, a fireman is looking for a fire to put out, causing additional confusion; but what the "bald singer" is all about, you can find out for yourself.

Takeover of the production from Schauspielhaus Graz