The Bald Soprano Summary & Analysis

The play opens on a comfortable “middle-class English interior.” Mr. Smith sits smoking and reading a newspaper while his wife, Mrs. Smith, knits. When the clock chimes 17 times, Mrs. Smith begins reviewing the dinner that their maid Mary served to them earlier that night, giving a strangely laborious, monotonous assessment of the taste and quality of each course. Mr. Smith intermittently clicks his tongue, but he continues to read and doesn’t speak.

Mrs. Smith mentions their 2-year-old son, whom she suspects will enjoy drinking beer like his father. Mrs. Smith then mentions meeting a Rumanian yogurt vendor, and she then speaks highly of her doctor, who recommended yogurt to her. This doctor performs every patient’s operation on himself first. Mr. Smith objects that in that case, whenever one of his patients dies from a procedure, the doctor should be expected to have died as well, like a captain going down with a ship.

Mr. Smith reads from the paper that Bobby Watson has died. Mrs. Smith is shocked, but Mr. Smith chides her because he’s been dead two years, which he swiftly revises to three, then four years. They comment on the fine preservation of his corpse. They then discuss Bobby’s wife, children, aunts, and uncles, all named Bobby Watson, and all employed as “commercial travelers.”

Mr. Smith grows tired of Mrs. Smith’s questions about the Bobby Watsons and snaps at her. They briefly argue, then reconcile and kiss. Mary, the maid, enters and announces that she’s been out and about all afternoon, and that Mr. and Mrs. Martin are waiting at the door, expecting to have dinner with the Smiths. The Smiths exit to change clothes while Mary brings in the Martins, chides them for being late, and then exits.

Mr. Martin and Mrs. Martin sit and begin conversing as if they are strangers. They both feel that they have seen one another before but cannot recall where. They progressively deduce that they are both from Manchester, and that they both took the same train to London five weeks ago, sat in the same compartment, in seats directly opposite each other, live on the same street, in the same building, in the same apartment, and sleep in the same bed. These coincidences amaze them, but neither can recall meeting the other. Finally, they discover that they each have a daughter named Alice with one white and one red eye, and they conclude that they are Donald and Elizabeth, husband and wife. They affectionately embrace and fall asleep together in a chair.

Mary tiptoes on stage and whispers to the audience that the Martins are mistaken; they are not Donald and Elizabeth. Donald’s child has a white right eye and red left eye, but Elizabeth’s child has the reverse, destroying their chain of inferences. Mary says, “Let’s try not to know” who the real Donald and Elizabeth might be, then says her real name is Sherlock Holmes.

The Smiths reenter, and Mr. Martin angrily accuses them of keeping him and his wife waiting. They then have an awkward exchange of small talk punctuated by silence, in which Mrs. Smith says that her husband has wet his pants. Mr. Martin encourages his wife to tell the Smiths what she saw earlier today. She says that she saw a man bent over to tie his shoe, which the others find shocking and unbelievable.

The doorbell rings. Mrs. Smith gets up to answer it, but no one is there. The same thing happens again. When it rings a third time, Mrs. Smith at first refuses to get up, but Mr. Smith and Mr. Martin prevail on her, insisting that someone must be there. Once again, she answers it, and no one is there. Mrs. Martin takes Mrs. Smith’s side against their husbands in the debate over whether a doorbell ringing means that someone is there, or the opposite.

The doorbell rings a fourth time, and Mrs. Smith angrily tells Mr. Smith to answer it himself. When he does so, the Fire Chief is there, which Mr. Smith takes as proof of his victory in the debate. The Fire Chief intervenes to settle the evident tension in the room and suggest that a doorbell ringing sometimes means someone is there, and sometimes it doesn’t. He tells the Smiths to kiss and make up.

The Fire Chief reveals he’s come on official business: to look for fires in the house. The Smiths and Martins both say their houses have had no fires, disappointing the Chief, whose business depends on them. The group discusses fires like an industry suffering in the bad current economy.

The group convinces the shy Fire Chief to tell them some stories. He tells three short and nonsensical stories about barnyard animals. Mr. Smith then tells a longer one about a fight between a snake and a fox, and Mrs. Smith tells one about a man giving and then retracting a bouquet of flowers from his fiancée. The Fire Chief then tells a long and meandering one about a distant relative who caught a cold.

No one has followed the Fire Chief’s last story, and all want to hear it again. He says he must leave because of the time, but the Smiths say they “don’t have the time here” since their clock always “indicates the opposite of what the hour really is.”

Mary enters and apologetically asks to share a story of her own. The Fire Chief recognizes her with surprise: it’s implied that they are former lovers. Mary calls herself his “little firehose.” They sensually embrace, scandalizing the others. The Martins feel that such displays are human and therefore honorable, but also that a maid is and can only ever be a maid. The Smiths wish that the display would not take place in the company of others, finding it “too exhibitionistic.” Mr. Martin calls this an example of British modesty.

Mrs. Martin tells Mary to go to the kitchen and read her poems in front of the mirror, something that Mr. Martin says he does as well. Mrs. Martin says that when he looked in the mirror this morning, he didn’t see himself, to which Mr. Martin says, “That’s because I wasn’t there yet.

Mary recites a poem in honor of the Fire Chief, called “The Fire.” The poem relates a series of men, animals and natural objects catching fire in the woods, culminating in the fire itself catching fire. As she recites, the Smiths push her off stage. The Fire Chief says that this poem depicts his ideal of the world. He then announces that he must leave to get across town for an upcoming fire. The guests thank him for coming. As he walks out, he stops himself to ask about “the bald soprano.” Amid “general embarrassment,” Mrs. Smith replies that she “always wears her hair in the same style.” Satisfied, the Fire Chief exits.

The group now begins an exchange of nonsensical pseudo-proverbs, such as, “He who sells an ox today, will have an egg tomorrow.” When Mr. Smith cries, “To Hell with polishing!” the group goes silent in shock. They slowly begin to speak again, in hostile tones, offering even more nonsensical sentence fragments based purely on sound (such as, “Cactus, coccyx! crocus! cockaded! cockroach!”). This quickly devolves into simply listing the letters of the alphabet. The stage goes dark, and they all chant with increasingly frantic speed, “it’s not that way, it’s over here,” over and over again. They stop abruptly, and the lights come back on, with Mr. and Mrs. Martin in the seats occupied by the Smiths at the play’s opening. They begin to say the exact same lines that the Smiths said to start the play, as the curtain falls.