• weird classic
• theatre of the absurd
• speech ballet

The title may seem a little peculiar, but the content is not unfamiliar. Eugène Ionesco’s “anti-play” from the year 1948 ignores all previously valid rules of the theatre and features a wall-clock that runs amok. It is considered to be the founding document of the Theatre of the Absurd, a genre made prominent during the 1950s by dramatists like Samuel Beckett. Created as a response to the horrors of the Nazi-era and the Second World war, both form and content of the Theatre of the Absurd postulated meaninglessness as the only meaningful state of existence. But in the case of Ionesco, the result of this profoundly melancholic stocktaking is highly amusing: Quirky characters are placed into droll situations, resulting in an exuberant theatre where bizarre dialogues escalate into a firework of meaningless phrases and nonsensical sentences.

The plot – if we can call it that – is easily summarised: After dinner, Mr and Mrs Smith are terribly bored with each other until a married couple that they are friends with drops by for a visit, although on entering, the visitors first have to determine whether they even know each other. In the end, the two are delighted to find out that they sleep in the same bed and have a child together. The evening’s conversation, however, grows more and more strange: Mary, the maid, believes herself to be a fireman and looks for a blaze to put out, which leads to even more confusion. But we will leave it up to you, the audience, to find out what the bald soprano has to do with all of this.