When theatre and anti-theatre collide

Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Prima Donna. And first off, don't start on about how it should be The Bald Soprano, or The Bald Singer, or anything else so pointlessly emasculated. La Cantatrice chauve. The flavour is the operatic equivalent of a prima ballerina, right? With an extra hint of the exotic thrown in for free. And nothing at all to do with Britney You-know-who. Maybe.

Anyway, it's the show that I'm directing with The Finn-Brit Players for production in May. I'll get a plug in early: it's gonna be a blast!

Reactions to this choice of play vary. The majority look slightly puzzled, as if they feel they should have heard the name but can't quite place it. Some smile enigmatically and use words like 'brave' and 'challenging'. And a fabulous few brighten perceptibly and say 'wow!'

I have wanted to explore some Ionesco for a while. This play was already on my list to examine more carefully when, a few years ago, I happened upon a production of The Chairs at the Edinburgh Fringe. That created such a fantastic atmosphere from an almost empty auditorium that I knew there was something to be done.

One of the main issues is that The Bald Prima Donna presents an Absurdist 'passing time pointlessly' scenario alongside a parody of theatrical techniques. (And here I do take issue with the translation that changed the French 'anti-pièce' to the English 'pseudo-play'. This is anti-theatre.) We get both the tragicomedy of pointless small talk posing as real conversation, and the satirical finger-poke at falsehoods in narrative development and storytelling, including abandonment of any pretence of rationality.

Opening that up, and turning the simultaneous time-wasting and parody-of-time-wasting into theatre that is both watchable and true to the original intent ... now there is a challenge. And as we approach the business end of the rehearsal schedule, it's time for the pseudo-inaction to become positively statically charged.