Quick Info
Eugène Ionesco was very surprised that the audience laughed at his first play. Actually, he had wanted to write a "tragedy of language" with Die kahle Sängerin, composed of incoherent but contextually correct examples of conversation from his English lessons. In the crossfire: a petty-bourgeois post-war society entrenching itself behind empty linguistic shells. The result is a play without meaning, but with a plot.
An evening at Mr. and Mrs. Smith's, a married couple who seem trapped in a banal conversation. They talk past each other, they argue about trivia and make up, they ask important questions like this: Why do they only ever give the ages of the dead and never the ages of the newborns in the registry office news in the newspaper? When another couple, the Martins, come to visit, unfortunately recognising neither themselves nor their hosts, a conversation sparks off, complicated by amnesia: Coughing sheepishly, they try to tell each other about the "events" of the day, getting lost in the fog of reality in search of the truth, which no one knows where it is hiding. With a bored fire chief searching the entire town in vain for Branden, and the Smiths' maid introducing herself as Sherlock Holmes, the chaos is perfect.
With Die kahle Sängerin, the "Theatre of the Absurd" is founded in 1950, which seeks to confront the senselessness of the world and the disoriented human being in it through grotesquely comic and unreal scenes. The play is more than just a parody of social conventions. The apparent nonsense plays on the fine line of logic on which language walks. Words lose their meaning and become mere sounds, while in the background a free-spirited wall clock strikes when and how it suits. At least the car drives fast, but the cook cooks better. Because as they say from experience: better to hatch an egg than to tend a porridge.
Cast
- Mrs. Smith
- Stacyian Jackson
- Mr. Smith
- Stefan Hunstein
- Mrs. Martin
- Jele Brückner
- Mr. Martin
- Marius Huth
- Feuerwehrfrau
- Danai Chatzipetrou
- Diener
- Konstantin Bühler
Staff
- Johan Simons
