The Bald Soprano

La Cantatrice Chauve, translated to The Bald Soprano in English, is a 1950 absurdist play by Eugène Ionesco and a seminal work of the Theatre of the Absurd movement. Ionesco was famously inspired to write the play while learning English from an Assimil language primer, in which cliché English characters having artificial conversations and reciting basic facts of life soon began to take on absurd philosophical meaning for the playwright. The Bald Soprano was Ionesco’s first play and would become one of his best-known works. He called this play an “anti-play” for the way it rejected traditional theatrical conventions, and a “tragedy of language” for the way language disintegrates into empty platitudes and non-sequitur conversations incapable of conveying meaning as the play moves toward its climax.

This guide refers to Donald M. Allen’s English translation, published in The Bald Soprano and Other Plays (Grove Press, 1958). The version is translated from the French text published in Eugène Ionesco: Théâtre, Volume 1 (Librairie Gallimard, 1954). Allen’s translation does not include any scene divisions, so this guide uses page numbers to divide key beats in the play. As an anti-play, The Bald Soprano resists theatrical conventions such as a central

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