The bald singer

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The bald singer ( French original title La Cantatrice chauve ) is a play by Eugène Ionesco . The premiere took place on May 11, 1950 at the Théâtre des Noctambules in Paris under the direction of Nicolas Bataille. It has been on the program of the Théâtre de la Huchette every day since 1957, which The Bald Singer has shown more than 17,000 times together with The Lesson and has received the Molière Theater Prize for its double performance . In its various interpretations, the anti-play , according to its subtitle, is one of the most frequently cited examples of the in FranceAbsurd theater . It is also very popular in the German-speaking area, especially - not least because of its low staffing requirements - with experimental student, cellar and room theaters that have to get by with small ensembles.

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Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Still)

(The page numbers in the following sections refer to the dtv edition.)

The sparse plot of the play's 11 scenes is quickly told: Near London (30), Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a middle-class British couple, sit by the fireplace at home in the evenings, read, keep quiet, get bored, try something small talk, tease and fight over bagatelles, make up again. They are about to take a nap when their maid, Mary, appears and announces two guests, Mr. and Mrs. Martin.
While the hosts are quickly changing their clothes, the Martins enter the room and shyly take a seat. Like two strangers, they begin to appraise each other and ask "in a sluggish, uniform tone": "Haven't we met somewhere?" Gradually they discover more and more similarities between them, finally, just as monotonously and without every surprise to come to the conclusion: “We have already met once, and you are my own wife. Elisabeth, I have you again! […] Donald, it's you darling! ”This is followed by a“ blank kiss ”and Mr. Martin's suggestion:“ Let us forget everything, darling, that has not been between us […] and live as before. ”(17)
Mr and Mrs. Smith return "without changing their clothes," but claim they changed their gala dresses for the guests and complain angrily that the Martins allegedly kept them waiting for four hours. There is an embarrassed silence and coughing, then the tentative attempt to tell each other about the “experiences” of the day: One man tied his loose shoelace, another read a newspaper in the subway. The doorbell rings as if in relief. Mrs. Smith goes and opens it, but there's no one outside. The procedure is repeated three times. When the bell rings for the fourth time and Mrs. Smith refuses, her husband answers the door, and lo and behold: “It's the fire chief!” (20)
He has too little to do and is looking for a fire that he could put out . Unfortunately, society cannot serve him with this. As a consolation, Mrs. Smith asks him to “stay a while” and “tell a few anecdotes” (25). The fire chief goes all out and serves three pointless fables: “The dog and the ox”, “The young calf” and, especially briefly, namely only one sentence long, “The rooster”. The landlord pays back with the no less absurd story of "the snake and the fox", whereupon Mrs. Martin recites the only anecdote she knows. It is entitled "The Bouquet of Flowers" and is about a groom who gives flowers to his bride and then immediately takes them away again without a word, "to teach her a lesson" (27).

The fire chief wants to go, but is forced to tell one last story, although he is meanwhile boring everyone: "The cold", a family tree with a completely confusing commentary. Before he can tell her a second time to clarify, the maid, Mary, enters the living room and presumes that she also wants to tell an anecdote. The general outrage only subsides when Mary suddenly throws herself at the fire chief's neck and it turns out that the two were once in love with each other. While Mary is firing a truly fiery poem (“Das Feuer”) in honor of her fiery childhood love, she is rudely “pushed out of the room” by the host (31). - The fire chief says goodbye, not without asking about the "Bald Singer" when leaving. General embarrassed silence. Then Mrs. Smith: "She still wears the same hairstyle!" (32)
In the final scene, back among themselves, the two couples begin to bombard each other with isolated platitudes and nonsense sentences that are becoming increasingly scarce and soon consist only of single words, even letters. Suddenly the light goes out. As the last crescendo, everyone shouted together, with increased rhythm and “in the highest rage” (35), seven times in a row the meaningless sentence: “It is not there, it is there!” ("C'est pas par là, c'est par ici "). Then suddenly there is dead silence. “The stage is slowly getting light again. The Martins are sitting in the same place as the Smiths at the beginning of the play. The whole thing starts all over again, the same sentences are spoken while the curtain falls. "(36)

interpretation

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Still)

Ionesco was amazed that the audience laughed at his play. He meant it tragically, as “la tragédie du langage”. His characters only cover up the thoughtlessness and boredom between them with their talk. They are victims of their language, prisoners in everyday chatter, which documents their inner emptiness and loneliness and reveals the banality and superficiality of their world. “The Smiths, the Martins can no longer talk to each other because they can no longer think; they can no longer think because they can no longer move anything, because they no longer feel passions; they can no longer be, they can become anyone, anything; since they have lost their own identity, they are always just the other [...] they are interchangeable. ”Ionesco does not want to arouse pity for these puppets. On the contrary, he attacks their lack of individuality, their automatism-like conformism, their petty bourgeoisie entrenched behind empty language sleeves, and leads them to absurdity . According to Ionesco, what the viewer perceives as the comic and surreal about the piece is basically only the real, disguised by nothing, the reality of the disoriented post-war society. “The people in The Bald Singer are not hungry, not longing that they are aware of; they are bored to death. You also feel it vaguely, which is why the explosion takes place at the end - but it is completely useless, since both the characters and the situations are static and interchangeable and everything ends where it began. ”- The end of the piece, however, was originally Planned completely differently (see “History of origin” below).

History of origin

Ionesco came up with the idea for the piece when he was learning English using the Assimil method, using their famous textbook L'anglais sans peine (“English without effort”) and marveling at its tautological dialogues. For example, it was recorded that the week had seven days, that the floor was down, the ceiling up. As the lessons became more challenging, a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, appeared to tell each other their names, how long they had been married, how many children they had, where they lived, and that their name was a maid Mary owned. Later a second couple, the Martins, joined them, with whom one could exchange experiences and share wisdom such as: "In the country it is quieter than in the city."

Ionesco took over the names of the characters and many of their platitudes and composed a play out of them that gradually made the clichés more parodic and degenerated into mere stammering. At first he wanted to give his "anti-play" the title of his textbook, L'anglais sans peine , but later considered it and modified it to L'heure anglaise . The name Big Ben Follies was also temporarily up for debate. But when the fire chief's actors forgot his lines during one of the rehearsals and instead of institutrice blonde (blonde lecturer) accidentally said cantatrice chauve (bald singer), the final title was born - not even though it was just a slip of the tongue and not even though a bald one Singer was never mentioned at any point in the piece, but precisely because he was just a slip of the tongue and thus corresponded to one of Ionesco's central intentions, the representation of everyday misunderstandings and truisms.

The end of the piece was almost as random as the title. Originally, following the last dispute between the two couples, some extras placed in the auditorium were supposed to shout with boos and protests for the theater director, who would then appear with several armed police officers who were supposed to take the audience under machine gun fire, while the director and the police chief congratulated each other with a handshake. But this solution would have required too many additional actors and resulted in unnecessary additional costs. So Ionesco proposed a cheaper version: As soon as the argument had reached its climax, the housemaid Mary would announce the author, and when he appeared, the actors would respectfully step aside and clap. Suddenly the author would then step up to the ramp and suddenly start abusing the audience in harsh tones. As Ionesco reports, however, such a conclusion was rejected as "too polemical". So it was finally decided to forego an ending altogether and to start again at the end.

See also

literature

Text output

  • The bald singer. La Cantatrice Chauve. Anti-piece. Translated by Serge Stauffer . In: Absurd theater. Pieces by Ionesco, Arrabal, Tardieu, Ghelderode, Audiberti. Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag dtv, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-423-01626-4 , pp. 5–36 (first edition 1966)
  • Théatre I: La Cantatrice chauve, La Lecon, Jacques ou la soumission, Les Chaises, Victimes du devoir, Amédée. Gallimard, Paris 1954
  • Plays: The Bald Singer, The Lesson, Jacob or Obedience, The Chairs, Sacrifice of Duty, Amédée or How to Get Rid of Him. Translated by J. and U. Seelmann-Eggebert. Luchterhand, Neuwied 1959
  • Sacrifice of duty. A pseudodrama & the bald singer. An anti-piece. Fischer, Frankfurt 1961
  • The bald singer. Anti-piece. Reclam, Ditzingen 1986

Secondary literature

  • Martin Esslin : Eugène Ionesco: Theater and Antitheater. In. Martin Esslin: The theater of the absurd. Translated from the English by Marianne Falk. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1965, pp. 97–158 ( rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie 234/236).
  • Klaus Bahners: Notes on Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Singer, The Lesson, The Rhinos. König's explanations and materials , 392. C. Bange, Hollfeld 1998, ISBN 3-8044-1643-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "La Tragédie du Langage" is the title of Ionesco's essay which he wrote in 1958 (see footnote 4 below) as a commentary on his plays.
  2. ↑ E. Ionesco; Arguments and counter-arguments (Notes et contre-notes), (Translated by C. Bremer) Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand (1964), p. 160.
  3. ^ E. Ionesco, The World of Ionesco. In: International Theater Annual, No. 2, ed. v. Harold Hobson. London: Calder (1957)
  4. ^ E. Ionesco, La Tragédie du Language. In: “Spectacles”, No. 2. Paris, July 1958. p. 155.
  5. ↑ See Martin Esslin 1965, pp. 106-107.
  6. ↑ See Esslin 1965, p. 107
  7. ↑ Scenes (excerpts from a show by the Théâtre de la Roulotte), learning objectives, teaching suggestions for 7 double periods, worksheets, literature, online materials - also available on a separate data carrier