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The Bald Soprano
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Bald Soprano, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Logic, Reality, and the Absurd
The Bald Soprano spoofs the desire to logically pursue the truth in a world that’s patently absurd. At the center of the play are two long communal attempts at detective work. In the first case, the Smiths’ guests, Mr. and Mrs. Martin (who have forgotten one another but feel they have met before), work step by step through the exactly matching details of their past and their current living situations, with mounting surprise at the…
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Language and Communication
The play’s treatment of language is closely related to its investigation of life’s absurdity. Not only are the characters’ deductions about reality comically inadequate, but the very words they use to express their ideas devolve into meaningless chaos. Right from the play’s opening, the characters’ dialogue is a parody of communication: in discussing the death of their acquaintance Bobby Watson, for instance, Mr. and Mrs. Smith constantly contradict themselves, first expressing surprise at the news…
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Time
The reckless tolling of the Smiths’ clock punctuates the action of The Bald Soprano, imposing a constant awareness of time on both the audience and the play’s characters. Yet something is clearly amiss from the first moment of the play, when the clock tolls 17 times and Mrs. Smith says, “There, it’s nine o’clock,” a statement that wouldn’t even make sense if the clock were keeping 24-hour military time (which chiming clocks pretty much…
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Societal Expectations and Middle-Class Values
The Bald Soprano satirizes the pretensions of the middle class. The first words of the play are the stage directions, “SCENE: A middle-class English interior, with English armchairs.” The play ruthlessly undermines this world of bourgeois comfort—of armchairs, slippers, and pipe-smoking—by presenting its inhabitants as grotesque and clueless fools who nevertheless retain a smug sense of self-importance. At the beginning of the play, Mrs. Smith recounts how she abstained from having wine with…
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