At the time Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano, serious French theater was under the domination of writers who wrote very literate plays with serious, intellectual themes. Among them were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who, although they shared a philosophical kinship with Ionesco, chose to write in a traditional mode There were a few dissenters, particularly Antonin Artaud. In The Theatre and Its Double (1938), he had clamored for something new, an overpowering drama that would have an impact analogous to that of the Black Death on medieval Europe. Few outside small avant-garde circles listened, however, and the new theatrical revolution preached by Artaud, which Ionesco's anti-play helped promote, began far less dramatically than Artaud had hoped. On May 11, 1950, The Bald Soprano opened before an audience of three people who sat under a leaky roof at the dilapidated Theatre des Noctambules on Paris's Left Bank.

The audience...