La cantante calva

The Bald Soprano is provocative and absurd, a key part of the style often defined, rightly or wrongly, as theatre of the absurd. Its appeal remains intact, as it depicts the deplorable decay of our verbal communication.

The original work was written over 70 years ago, and staging it anew is not about treating it as a museum piece or a mere bit of fun entertainment but verifying its suitability in the present. Rather than being gutted, it must be adapted slightly to focus on the death throes of a Western civilisation that turns a deaf ear to the unsettling sounds of war and is unable to create a sustainable future for itself.

In this play -or ‘anti-play’, to paraphrase his author, Eugene Ionesco-, the attack on the language that is arbitrarily intended to represent the world we live in and our identity grows to an incessant barrage of replies that quite deliberately fracture dialogue, destroying and reducing it to conditions that are illogical and baseless.

The characters wander about in the claustrophobic space of their words and their lives, relegated to the roles of mere puppets moved by the manipulation of who knows who or what.

Shackled by expressions, stereotypes and shared places that do not belong to us, our lives continue to be marked by the pace of a phantasmal pendulum that swings ruthlessly and randomly.

At least once in our lives, when the language that forms the basis of our thoughts can no longer meaningfully address the outside world, we feel the queasiness of being possessed by an astonishing, universal estrangement; a certain surprise and reaction of our conscience. Note to self: I suspect this astonishment comes from the deepest and truest part of my conscience.

Enzo Scala