October 19, 2010
[Warning: Spoilers of plot points throughout, especially plot summary in first paragraph - Ed]
This is an early short play by Ionesco, which he himself described as an "anti-play" – as good a way as any to indicate that anything approaching boring old bourgeois commonplaces such as plot, character and rational dialogue have been tossed out the window. A teacher receives a new pupil for a lesson. She is a shiny, happy-faced automaton, whose responses to his questions exasperate him so much that he ends up murdering her. The dialogue doesn’t exactly crackle with wit or bludgeon with emotional power, thanks to Ionesco’s well-documented fascination with the mundane – for ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, we should really substitute ‘Statement of the Obvious’ – but it does have its own surreal humour and certainly the bloke behind me was chuckling happily away throughout. It is a little wistful to witness what passed as dangerously experimental in 1951 when modern theatre is busting its own boundaries in so many more ways, but if you fancy a spot of alienation and futility, then this may be for you. Ionesco trashes anything like a conventional story-line and builds the playlet around accelerating rhythms and cyclical repetitions to a tense crescendo. He doesn’t care for realistic psychology or coherent dialogue, showing us characters who seem mechanical, dehumanized, and speak in non-sequiturs, anticipating the gloriously off-key dialogue of Orton and Pinter. It does build to an uneasy sense of menace.
Olivia Madin as the Pupil was spectacularly shiny and happy until the onset of the toothache that heralded her doom. Max Fletcher was unconvincingly grumpy and old as the Professor, but his hair was very good, splendidly Einsteinesque. The real revelation of the evening though was Krittika Bhattacharjee, who was unreservedly brilliant and creepy as the Maid. She pops in and out during the course of the Lesson to warn the Professor against certain subjects because they will ‘get him too excited’, but she is clearly directing his actions in some bizarre and spooky way.
I wonder whether Ionesco would quite have approved of the way this production handled the end of the play, because it suddenly became intensely Freudian and dramatic. I won’t describe it or the eds will slap spoiler notices all over this [Who, me? - Ed.], but this is really worth leaving your cosy house for. I’m always interested in the insightful remarks of my teenage companion – when asked her opinion, she replied that it was rather like The Exorcist. How so? I enquired, thrilled at her capacity for cross-media comparison. She replied ‘because it’s only interesting for the last ten minutes’. A little harsh, in my view – but those ten minutes make the preceding tedium well worth while.