Ionesco play to open Youth Theater Festival

The revival of Eugene Ionesco's absurdist work The Bald Prima Donna opens the Beijing Youth Theater Festival this weekend. Directed by Zhou Shen (pictured left) and Liu Lu (pictured right), two young graduates from the Central Academy of Drama, the play retells the incomparable comedy satirizing the domestic conformity of the middle class in Western countries.

The ultimate English couple, the Smiths, are awaiting the late arrival of their dinner guests, the Martins. As the play opens, Mrs Smith extols the virtues of their ritual English supper with English beer "because we are English, because we live in the suburbs, because we are Smith". Slowly the twists in logic unravel as the conversation takes a surreal turn. By the time the mouse-like Martins and the bored fire chief arrive, the situation has descended into chaos.

It is said Ionesco wrote the play after learning English from a set of old phrase books. He was inspired by the banal and archaic language and bizarre exchanges to explore the futility of meaningful communication in modern society; the endless need for words to shut out the deafening silence at the heart of human existence.