Characters in The Bald Prima Donna talk about banal things, they say banal things. But I did not write the play in order to criticise the banality of their words: no, not at all. What they said did not seem banal to me, but, to the greatest extent, shocking and extraordinary. A comedy was born, although the initial feeling was not one of comedy. Onto this starting point several things were grafted: the sense of the world’s strangeness, the language spoken by people, which became unfamiliar to me, concepts stripped of their content, gestures deprived of their meaning, a parody of theatre, a critique of conversational clichés. I told myself that starting from the simplest elements: arithmetic, the alphabet of arithmetic, if I may put it that way, one could create a play. To push burlesque to its limits. (…) The transition from burlesque to tragedy must be done in such a way that the audience does not notice it. The characters in The Bald Soprano have nothing to say to each other, yet they constantly chatter about it.
Eugène Ionesco