The opening night for the performance “The Chairs and the Bald Soprano” took place on the stage of Saratov Academic Kiselev Youth Theatre on 17th September, 2008.

Eugene Ionesco – a French playwright, essayist and philosopher, one of the leading representatives of illogical, tragicomical drama, called “the theatre of the Absurd”. Situations, characters and dialogs in his plays seem to follow images from dreams rather then from everyday life. His language with all sparkling paradoxes, clichés, sayings and other plays on words becomes free from usual meanings and connotations. Surrealism of Ionesco’s works comes from the circus clownery, Charley Chaplin’s movies and the ancient and medieval farce. The most popular plays “The Chairs” and “The Bald Soprano” were created in early 50s.

Famous Italian stage director Paolo Emilio Landi known to the Saratov audience for his other performances in our theatre (“The Italian Marriage”, “A Servant to Two Masters”, “Noises off”) united two plays of Eugene Ionesco in one performance “The Chairs /The Bald Soprano”. Michael Corvin, a French critic, notes: “Ionesco beats and destroys to change what sounds hollow, to make language a theatre matter, almost a character, make him to cause laughter, to work as a mechanism; and this means that life would be breathed into the most banal connections,  basic principles of middle-class society would be ruined”

In his performance as if following principles of the street theatre Paolo Emilio Landi demands improvisation not only from the actors, but also from the audience, he makes his spectators search for the possible extensions  of that what is happening on the stage and beyond it. Characters presented in the performance are endued with “realistic” features, which are intentionally overacted by the absence of all the kinds of empirical veracity.
Actors:

He	Emelyanov Valery Nikolayevich
She	Vovnenko Elena Vitalievna
Orator, a fire captain	Kuzin Artem Evgenievich
Mr. Smith	Chernyshev Alexey Nickolaevich
Mrs. Smith	Krasnova Elena Alexeyevna
Mary	Nikulina Svetlana Igorevna