About The Book

The leading figure of absurdist theater and one of the great innovators of the modern stage, Eugène Ionesco (1909-94) did not write his first play, The Bald Soprano, until 1950. He went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound. As Ionesco has said, “Theater is not literature. . . . It is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means.”

Praise

“The Bald Soprano is explosively, liberatingly funny . . . a loony parody with a climax which is an orgy of non-sequiturs.” —The Observer

“Startling and often brilliant. The lack of spiritual content in our civilization has been the major outcry of European drama since Isben. Ionesco has carried this idea to the climactic point of savage caricature.” —Harold Clurman