La Cantatrice chauve – translated from French as The Bald Soprano or The Bald Prima Donna – is the first play written by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco .
69-471: Nicolas Bataille directed the premiere on 11 May 1950 at the Théâtre des Noctambules , Paris. Since 1957, it has been in permanent showing at the Théâtre de la Huchette , which received a Molière d'honneur for its performances. It holds the world record for the play that has been staged continuously in the same theatre for the longest time. Although it went unnoticed at first, the play was eventually championed by
138-473: A 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er' ." Beckett's own relationship with Sartre was complicated by a mistake made in the publication of one of his stories in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes . Beckett said, though he liked Nausea , he generally found the writing style of Sartre and Heidegger to be "too philosophical" and he considered himself "not a philosopher". The "absurd" or "new theater" movement
207-407: A French stage actor is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Theatre of the absurd The theatre of the absurd ( French : théâtre de l'absurde [teɑtʁ(ə) də lapsyʁd] ) is a post– World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre
276-404: A climax in which the "author" or "manager" antagonizes the audience, and even a version in which the audience is shot with machine guns. However, he ultimately settled for a cheaper solution, the cycle. Ionesco told Claude Bonnefoy [ fr ; ro ] in an interview, "I wanted to give a meaning to the play by having it begin all over again with two characters. In this way the end becomes
345-423: A complicated relationship with him. Sartre praised Genet's plays, stating that for Genet, "Good is only an illusion. Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good". Ionesco, however, hated Sartre bitterly. Ionesco accused Sartre of supporting communism but ignoring the atrocities committed by communists; he wrote Rhinoceros as a criticism of blind conformity, whether it be to Nazism or communism; at
414-586: A continuous loop. The final scene contains stage instructions to start the performance over from the very beginning, with the Martin couple substituted for the Smith couple and vice versa. However, this decision was only added in after the show's hundredth performance, and it was originally the Smiths who restarted the show, in exactly the same manner as before. According to Ionesco, he had several possible endings in mind, including
483-439: A far more vital contemporary fashion." Ionesco replied, "I have the feeling that these writers – who are serious and important – were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language. With them it was still rhetoric, eloquence. With Adamov and Beckett it really
552-547: A few established writers and critics and, in the end, won critical acclaim. By the 1960s, The Bald Soprano had already been recognized as a modern classic and an important seminal work in the Theatre of the Absurd . With a record number of interpretations, it has become one of the most performed plays in France . The idea for the play came to Ionesco while he was trying to learn English with
621-519: A fifth playwright, Harold Pinter . Other writers associated with this group by Esslin and other critics include Tom Stoppard , Friedrich Dürrenmatt , Fernando Arrabal , Edward Albee , Boris Vian , and Jean Tardieu . The mode of most "absurdist" plays is tragicomedy . As Nell says in Endgame , "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness … it's the most comical thing in the world". Esslin cites William Shakespeare as an influence on this aspect of
690-605: A flexible sense of the limits of stage and illusion—to examine a highly-theatricalized vision of identity ". Another influential playwright was Guillaume Apollinaire whose The Breasts of Tiresias was the first work to be called " surreal ". A precursor is Alfred Jarry whose Ubu plays scandalized Paris in the 1890s. Likewise, the concept of 'pataphysics —"the science of imaginary solutions"—first presented in Jarry's Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien ( Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician )
759-546: A gaucho author established himself as a precursor of the theater of the absurd in Brazilian lands. Qorpo-Santo , pseudonym of José Joaquim de Campos Leão, released during the last years of his life several theatrical works that can be classified as precursors of the theater of the absurd. However, he is little known, even in his homeland, but works such as "Mateus e Mateusa" are gradually being rediscovered by scholars in Brazil and around
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#1732884827486828-453: A junk heap on stage and the sounds of breathing. The plot may also revolve around an unexplained metamorphosis, a supernatural change, or a shift in the laws of physics. For example, in Ionesco's Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It , a couple must deal with a corpse that is steadily growing larger and larger; Ionesco never fully reveals the identity of the corpse, how this person died, or why it
897-566: A large number of guests to their home, but these guests are invisible, so all we see are empty chairs, a representation of their absence. Likewise, the action of Godot is centered around the absence of a man named Godot, for whom the characters perpetually wait. In many of Beckett's later plays, most features are stripped away and what's left is a minimalistic tableau: a woman walking slowly back and forth in Footfalls , for example, or in Breath only
966-528: A new beginning but, since there are two couples in the play, it begins the first time with the Smiths and the second time with the Martins, to suggest the interchangeable nature of the characters: the Smiths are the Martins and the Martins are the Smiths". Nicolas Bataille Nicolas Bataille (14 March 1926 – 28 October 2008) was a French actor and director. The son of a Parisian architect, Nicolas Bataille (born Roger Bataille) debuted as an actor during
1035-621: A prize for avant-garde young theater companies. The next year, he forged with Akakia-Viala a fake text by Rimbaud: The Spiritual Hunt , which was published in the French resistance newspaper Combat (newspaper) , on 19 May 1949 and subsequently in Mercure de France . At the start of the 1950s, he received L'Anglais sans peine , the first unpublished work by a still unknown French author of Romanian origin, Eugène Ionesco . He directed this absurdist , which would be called The Bald Soprano , on 11 May 1950 at
1104-454: A routine, or in a metafictional conceit, trapped in a story; the title characters in Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead , for example, find themselves in a story ( Hamlet ) in which the outcome has already been written. The plots of many absurdist plays feature characters in interdependent pairs, commonly either two males or a male and a female. Some Beckett scholars call this
1173-540: Is a very naked reality that is conveyed through the apparent dislocation of language." In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Beckett's primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity" - or the repetition of life even though the end result will be the same no matter what and everything is essentially pointless - as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame , Beckett's work focuses, "on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as
1242-658: Is also frequently compared to surrealism's predecessor, Dadaism (for example, the Dadaist plays by Tristan Tzara performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich). Many of the absurdists had direct connections with the Dadaists and surrealists. Ionesco, Adamov, and Arrabal for example, were friends with surrealists still living in Paris at the time including Paul Eluard and André Breton ,
1311-653: Is continually growing, but the corpse ultimately – and, again, without explanation – floats away. In Tardieu's "The Keyhole" a lover watches a woman through a keyhole as she removes her clothes and then her flesh. Like Pirandello, many absurdists use meta-theatrical techniques to explore role fulfillment, fate, and the theatricality of theatre. This is true for many of Genet's plays: for example, in The Maids , two maids pretend to be their mistress; in The Balcony brothel patrons take on elevated positions in role-playing games, but
1380-458: Is coupled with the inadequacy of language to form meaningful human connections. According to Martin Esslin, absurdism is "the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose" Absurdist drama asks its viewer to "draw his own conclusions, make his own errors". Though Theatre of the Absurd may be seen as nonsense, they have something to say and can be understood". Esslin makes a distinction between
1449-479: Is going to name another relative by the same name, but being that they all have the same name and work in the same industry the Smiths have a difficult time figuring out who is who. Their maid, Mary enters, announcing that the Martins have arrived. The Smiths leave. The Martins enter, and Mary chides them for being late; then she exits. After entering the room, the Martins realize that they have met each other before. They are surprised to find that they are both from
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#17328848274861518-590: Is no longer entering from the outside but exists within the confined space. Other absurdists use this kind of plot, as in Albee's A Delicate Balance : Harry and Edna take refuge at the home of their friends, Agnes and Tobias, because they suddenly become frightened. They have difficulty explaining what has frightened them: Absence, emptiness, nothingness, and unresolved mysteries are central features in many absurdist plots: for example, in The Chairs , an old couple welcomes
1587-838: Is typical of Pinter: Much of the dialogue in absurdist drama (especially in Beckett's and Albee's plays) reflects this kind of evasiveness and inability to make a connection. When language that is apparently nonsensical appears, it also demonstrates this disconnection. It can be used for comic effect, as in Lucky's long speech in Godot when Pozzo says Lucky is demonstrating a talent for "thinking" as other characters comically attempt to stop him: Nonsense may also be used abusively, as in Pinter's The Birthday Party when Goldberg and McCann torture Stanley with apparently nonsensical questions and non-sequiturs : As in
1656-449: The Assimil method. Impressed by the contents of the dialogues, often very sober and strange, he decided to write an absurd play named L'anglais sans peine ("English without toil"). Other possible titles which were considered included Il pleut des chiens et des chats, ("It's raining cats and dogs", translated in French literally); "L'heure anglaise" and "Big Ben Follies". Its actual title
1725-611: The Occupation of France while following the dramatic teachings of René Simon , Tania Balachova , and the comedian Solange Sicard [ fr ] . Appearing in Children of Paradise by Marcel Carné , he obtained his first notable roles at the Liberation of France . In 1948, he staged A Season in Hell from the poem by Arthur Rimbaud , with Akakia-Viala [ fr ] and received
1794-439: The Théâtre des Noctambules in the 5th arrondissement of Paris . His ability to do so was largely thanks to his friendship with Claude Autant-Lara 's family, who also provided him the costumes for Occupe-toi d'Amélie! . The play was initially a public and critical failure, but he resumed it starting on 11 May 1957 at La Huchette , thanks to the growing success of its author and the financial support of Louis Malle . He remained
1863-581: The "absurd drama". Shakespeare's influence is acknowledged directly in the titles of Ionesco's Macbett and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . Friedrich Dürrenmatt says in his essay "Problems of the Theatre", "Comedy alone is suitable for us … But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not. We can achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly; indeed, many of Shakespeare's tragedies are already really comedies out of which
1932-507: The "dream plays" of August Strindberg . One commonly cited precursor is Luigi Pirandello , especially Six Characters in Search of an Author . Pirandello was a highly regarded theatrical experimentalist who wanted to bring down the fourth wall presupposed by the realism of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen . According to W. B. Worthen , Six Characters and other Pirandello plays use " metatheatre — roleplaying , plays-within-plays , and
2001-598: The "pseudocouple". The two characters may be roughly equal or have a begrudging interdependence (like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot or the two main characters in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead ); one character may be clearly dominant and may torture the passive character (like Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot or Hamm and Clov in Endgame ); the relationship of
2070-491: The Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to
2139-509: The French philosopher Albert Camus's essay "Myth of Sisyphus", as it uses the word "absurdity" to describe the human situation: "In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. … This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." Esslin presents the four defining playwrights of the movement as Samuel Beckett , Arthur Adamov , Eugène Ionesco , and Jean Genet , and in subsequent editions he added
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2208-468: The Martins, who are asleep. She tells the audience that the two are mistaken, that they are not husband and wife, but that, never mind, things should be left just as they are. The Martins, alone, agree that now that they've found each other, they should just live as they had before. When the Smiths return they talk about and with their guests. The doorbell rings and Mr. Smith goes to open the door. The Fire Chief enters. He's disappointed to find no fire at
2277-583: The Old Man and Old Woman in The Chairs " übermarionettes "). Characters are frequently stereotypical, archetypal , or flat character types as in Commedia dell'arte. The more complex characters are in crisis because the world around them is incomprehensible. Many of Pinter's plays, for example, feature characters trapped in an enclosed space menaced by some force the character cannot understand. Pinter's first play
2346-441: The Smiths' maid, Mary, and the local fire chief, who is also Mary's lover. The two families engage in meaningless banter, telling stories and relating nonsensical poems. At one point, Mrs. Martin converses with her husband as if he were a stranger she just met. As the fire chief turns to leave, he mentions "the bald soprano" in passing, which has a very unsettling effect on the others. Mrs. Smith replies that "she always styles her hair
2415-526: The Smiths', but they promise that they'll call him if one occurs. While they wait for something to happen they tell telling stories, none of which make sense. Mary enters and tells her own story, in which she reveals that she is the lover of the Fire Chief. The Smiths then push her out of the room. The Fire Chief leaves. Before departure, he mentions the bald soprano. The Martins and the Smiths recite nonsensical truisms. Then all sense of language dissipates as
2484-416: The above examples, nonsense in absurdist theatre may be also used to demonstrate the limits of language while questioning or parodying the determinism of science and the knowability of truth. In Ionesco's The Lesson , a professor tries to force a pupil to understand his nonsensical philology lesson: Traditional plot structures are rarely a consideration in the theatre of the absurd. Plots can consist of
2553-493: The absurd playwrights employ techniques borrowed from earlier innovators. Writers and techniques frequently mentioned in relation to the theatre of the absurd include the 19th-century nonsense poets, such as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear ; Polish playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz ; the Russians Daniil Kharms , Nikolai Erdman , and others; Bertolt Brecht 's distancing techniques in his " epic theatre "; and
2622-460: The absurd repetition of cliché and routine, as in Godot or The Bald Soprano . Often there is a menacing outside force that remains a mystery; in The Birthday Party , for example, Goldberg and McCann confront Stanley, torture him with absurd questions, and drag him off at the end, but it is never revealed why. In later Pinter plays, such as The Caretaker and The Homecoming , the menace
2691-560: The beginning of the play for a while before the curtain closes. The play opens on Mrs. Smith reciting the events of the night with Mr. Smith. They discuss the death of someone they knew, Bobby Watson. The play then shifts back to reality and they realize that Bobby has been dead for four years. Suddenly they flash back to when he was alive and engaged to a woman who was also called Bobby Watson. Then they shift back to reality where they realize that he has left behind two children and they are gossiping about whom his wife will remarry. Allegedly she
2760-483: The chaos of a world that science and logic have abandoned. Ionesco's recurring character Berenger, for example, faces a killer without motivation in The Killer , and Berenger's logical arguments fail to convince the killer that killing is wrong. In Rhinocéros , Berenger remains the only human on Earth who has not turned into a rhinoceros and must decide whether or not to conform. Characters may find themselves trapped in
2829-418: The characters may shift dramatically throughout the play (as in Ionesco's The Lesson or in many of Albee's plays, The Zoo Story for example). Despite its reputation for nonsense language, much of the dialogue in absurdist plays is naturalistic. The moments when characters resort to nonsense language or clichés—when words appear to have lost their denotative function, thus creating misunderstanding among
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2898-472: The characters—make the theatre of the absurd distinctive. Language frequently gains a certain phonetic, rhythmical, almost musical quality, opening up a wide range of often comedic playfulness. Tardieu, for example, in the series of short pieces Theatre de Chambre arranged the language as one arranges music. Distinctively absurdist language ranges from meaningless clichés to vaudeville-style word play to meaningless nonsense. The Bald Soprano , for example,
2967-413: The city of Manchester , that they both took the same train to London , that they both traveled second class, that they both reside at No. 19 Bromfield Street, that they sleep in the same bed, and that they both have a two-year-old daughter named Alice with one red eye and one white eye. They come to the conclusion that they are husband and wife. They recognize each other and embrace. Mary is on stage with
3036-582: The dictionary definition of absurd ("out of harmony" in the musical sense) and drama's understanding of the absurd: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless." The characters in absurdist drama are lost and floating in an incomprehensible universe and they abandon rational devices and discursive thought because these approaches are inadequate. Many characters appear as automatons stuck in routines speaking only in cliché (Ionesco called
3105-406: The end of the play, one man remains on Earth resisting transformation into a rhinoceros. Sartre criticized Rhinoceros by questioning: "Why is there one man who resists? At least we could learn why, but no, we learn not even that. He resists because he is there." Sartre's criticism highlights a primary difference between the theatre of the absurd and existentialism: the theatre of the absurd shows
3174-557: The failure of man without recommending a solution. In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy [ fr ; ro ] , comparing the absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, "It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and yourself started out less from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought out these themes, you expressed them in
3243-448: The founder of surrealism, and Beckett translated many surrealist poems by Breton and others from French into English. Many of the absurdists were contemporaries with Jean-Paul Sartre , the philosophical spokesman for existentialism in Paris, but few absurdists actually committed to Sartre's own existentialist philosophy, as expressed in Being and Nothingness , and many of the absurdists had
3312-526: The futility of meaningful communication in modern society. The script is charged with non sequiturs that give the impression that the characters are not even listening to each other in their frantic efforts to make their own voices heard. There was speculation that it was parody around the time of its first performance, but Ionesco states in an essay written to his critics that he had no intention of parody, but if he were parodying anything, it would be everything. The Bald Soprano appears to have been written as
3381-470: The human situation as meaningless and absurd. The absurd in these plays takes the form of man's reaction to a world apparently without meaning, or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. This style of writing was first popularized by the Eugène Ionesco play The Bald Soprano (1950). Although the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of
3450-1559: The influence of the absurdists grew, the style spread to other countries—with playwrights either directly influenced by absurdists in Paris or playwrights labelled absurdist by critics. In England, some of those whom Esslin considered practitioners of the theatre of the absurd include Harold Pinter , Tom Stoppard , N. F. Simpson , James Saunders , and David Campton ; in the United States, Edward Albee , Sam Shepard , Jack Gelber , and John Guare ; in Poland, Tadeusz Różewicz ; Sławomir Mrożek , and Tadeusz Kantor ; in Italy, Dino Buzzati ; and in Germany, Peter Weiss , Wolfgang Hildesheimer , and Günter Grass . In India, both Mohit Chattopadhyay and Mahesh Elkunchwar have also been labeled absurdists. Other international absurdist playwrights include Tawfiq el-Hakim from Egypt; Hanoch Levin from Israel; Miguel Mihura from Spain; José de Almada Negreiros from Portugal; Mikhail Volokhov from Russia; Yordan Radichkov from Bulgaria; and playwright and former Czech president Václav Havel . Plays within this group are absurd in that they focus not on logical acts, realistic occurrences, or traditional character development; they, instead, focus on human beings trapped in an incomprehensible world subject to any occurrence, no matter how illogical. The theme of incomprehensibility
3519-496: The language of absurdist theater becomes secondary to the poetry of the concrete and objectified images of the stage. Many of Beckett's plays devalue language for the sake of the striking tableau. Harold Pinter—famous for his "Pinter pause"—presents more subtly elliptical dialogue; often the primary things characters should address are replaced by ellipsis or dashes. The following exchange between Aston and Davies in The Caretaker
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#17328848274863588-461: The lifeblood of La Huchette until his death, more than half a century after introducing Eugène Ionesco to the public, and he performed the role of Monsieur Martin until June 2007, before a total of more than one million five hundred thousand spectators. He continued his theatrical career at the same time. In 1964 he staged in La Philosophie dans le boudoir , based on the book by Sade , a play that
3657-562: The line between theatre and reality starts to blur. Another complex example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead : it is a play about two minor characters in Hamlet ; these characters, in turn, have various encounters with the players who perform The Mousetrap , the play-within-the-play in Hamlet . In Stoppard's Travesties , James Joyce and Tristan Tzara slip in and out of the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest . Plots are frequently cyclical: for example, Endgame begins where
3726-454: The metro ), and a theater director staging Kleist in an open-air theater ( A Very Private Affair ). In addition, he played a protagonist of Jean Dréville 's film Normandie-Niémen [ fr ] and one of the manual laborers in Jacques Tati 's Mon Oncle . This article about a French film actor is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about
3795-409: The mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation. In the first edition of The Theatre of the Absurd , Esslin quotes
3864-442: The plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion— silence . Critic Martin Esslin coined
3933-452: The plays: broad comedy, often similar to vaudeville , mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the " well-made play ". In his introduction to the book Absurd Drama (1965), Esslin wrote: The Theatre of
4002-418: The same way." After the Fire Chief's exit, the play devolves into a series of complete non-sequiturs with no resemblance to normal conversation. It ends with the two couples shouting in unison "It's not that way. It's over here!" ( "C’est pas par là, c’est par ici!" ) right before a blackout occurs. When the lights come back on, the scene starts from the beginning with the Martins reciting the Smiths' lines from
4071-436: The term in his 1960 essay "The Theatre of the Absurd", which begins by focusing on the playwrights Samuel Beckett , Arthur Adamov , and Eugène Ionesco . Esslin says that their plays have a common denominator—the "absurd", a word that Esslin defines with a quotation from Ionesco: "absurd is that which has no purpose, or goal, or objective." The French philosopher Albert Camus , in his 1942 essay " Myth of Sisyphus ", describes
4140-534: The tragic arises." Though layered with a significant amount of tragedy, theatre of the absurd echoes other great forms of comedic performance, according to Esslin, from Commedia dell'arte to vaudeville . Similarly, Esslin cites early film comedians and music hall artists such as Charlie Chaplin , the Keystone Cops and Buster Keaton as direct influences. (Keaton even starred in Beckett's Film in 1965.) As an experimental form of theatre, many theatre of
4209-419: The two couples quarrel, but no one is able to communicate and none of their issues are resolved. As they argue the lights fade; when they rise again, the Martins are in the Smiths' living room, repeating the same lines with which the Smiths opened the play. Like many plays in the theatre of the absurd genre, the underlying theme of The Bald Soprano is not immediately apparent. Many suggest that it expresses
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#17328848274864278-521: The works of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti , then Offenbach, tu connais ? in the 1990s. He was a renowned director, both in France and Japan, where he was awarded several prizes between 1969 and 1976. For a time, he was the actor of choice for Louis Malle, who directed him in three of his films, in which he portrayed a client of a night bar ( Elevator to the Gallows ), a Russian driver of a tourist bus ( Zazie in
4347-454: The world. Artaud's " Theatre of Cruelty " (presented in Theatre and its Double ) was a particularly important philosophical treatise. Artaud claimed theatre's reliance on literature was inadequate and that the true power of theatre was in its visceral impact. Artaud was a surrealist , and many other members of the surrealist group were significant influences on the absurdists. Absurdism
4416-473: Was The Room – in which the main character, Rose, is menaced by Riley who invades her safe space though the actual source of menace remains a mystery. In Friedrich Dürrenmatt 's The Visit, the main character, Alfred, is menaced by Claire Zachanassian; Claire, richest woman in the world, with a decaying body and multiple husbands throughout the play, has guaranteed a payout for anyone in the town willing to kill Alfred. Characters in absurdist drama may also face
4485-502: Was inspirational to many later absurdists, some of whom joined the Collège de 'pataphysique, founded in honor of Jarry in 1948 (Ionesco, Arrabal, and Vian were given the title "transcendent satrape of the Collège de 'pataphysique"). The Theatre Alfred Jarry , founded by Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac , housed several absurdist plays, including ones by Ionesco and Adamov. In the 1860s,
4554-483: Was inspired by a language book in which characters would exchange empty clichés that never ultimately amounted to true communication or true connection. Likewise, the characters in The Bald Soprano —like many other absurdist characters—go through routine dialogue full of clichés without actually communicating anything substantive or making a human connection. In other cases, the dialogue is purposefully elliptical;
4623-588: Was originally a Paris-based (and a Rive Gauche ) avant-garde phenomenon tied to extremely small theatres in the Quartier Latin . Some of the absurdists, such as Jean Genet , Jean Tardieu , and Boris Vian ., were born in France. Many other absurdists were born elsewhere but lived in France, writing often in French: Beckett from Ireland; Ionesco from Romania; Arthur Adamov from Russia; Alejandro Jodorowsky from Chile and Fernando Arrabal from Spain. As
4692-577: Was quickly banned but continued to be performed. In 1966, in collaboration with Jean-François Adam , he directed L'été by Romain Weingarten at the Théâtre de Poche Montparnasse [ fr ] and L'Elève de Brecht by Bernard Da Costa [ fr ] in 1984. He won the SACD Georges-Pitoëff prize for his production of Le Cirque by Claude Mauriac . He was also interested in musicals, staging Twist Appeal with Vince Taylor in 1962,
4761-422: Was the result of an error in rehearsal by actor Henri-Jacques Huet : the fire chief's monologue initially included a mention of "l'institutrice blonde" ("the blonde schoolteacher"), but Huet said "la cantatrice chauve", and Ionesco, who was present, decided to re-use the phrase. The Smiths are a traditional couple from London who have invited another couple, the Martins, over for a visit. They are joined later by
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