‘The Bald Soprano’ by Eugene Ionesco is on stage at the Entezami Hall of the Iranian Artists’ Forum.
The play was first performed in a students’ festival and won the award for best directorship; it was also nominated for best actor and actress, ISNA reported Farzad Dehnavi, director of the play, as saying.
The play was also staged two years ago at Niavaran Cultural Center and Dariush Mehrjui, translator of the play, said it was “the best performance he had seen.”
Well established in the theatre of the absurd, ‘The Bald Soprano’ is Ionesco’s first play. When he first wrote the play, the reception was far from good and it was referred to as anti-theatre. “With its comical structure, the play undermines all the elements previously established in theatre,” the director said.
Comical
Ionesco has tried to convey “how empty, meaningless, and void of significance human communication has come to be,” Dehnavi said. The theatre group has recreated this message in a comical way.
Ionesco was best known as a Romanian playwright writing mostly in French. His plays ridicule the most banal situations and depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way.
While learning the English language, for Ionesco, the clichés and truisms of the conversation disintegrated into wild caricature and parody and the language fell apart; what remained were disjointed fragments of words. Ionesco translated this experience in ‘The Bald Soprano’. Many suggest that the play expresses futility of meaningful communication in modern society as characters do not so much as care to listen to each other but rather “engage in frenzied conversation.”
The play will be staged daily at 8.30pm until December 21. The forum is located on the southern side of Bagh-e-Honar, north Mousavi Street, Taleghani Avenue, Tehran.
