A New World Theatre Club production
Written by Eugene Ionesco.
Directed by Wendy Dunning-Baker.
Performed
11th to 13th May 2009 at the Carrè Rotondes, Luxembourg
and
31st May 2009 at the Centre Culturel de Woluwe St-Pierre, Brussels.
BEST PRODUCTION FEATS 2009!
The Lesson is a masterpiece of the theatre of the absurd and the surrealist avant garde, pushing the boundaries of morbid humour into the depths of darkness. A student, eager to learn quickly to qualify for her total doctorate exam, attends a private lesson in the house of a well-known professor and is guided through the basics of arithmetic, linguistics and comparative philology, only to be interrupted by the maid who warns the professor to be cautious and avoid philology, which “can only lead to calamity!”
The plot unfolds as the characters wrestle through language, the ultimate instrument of power, which eventually consumes them in complete destruction.
Review by Annie Dawes
Opening to eerie atmospheric music, the play engages the attention of the audience immediately. We see the Maid wheeling an armchair on to the stage and setting it in a traditional drawing room.
For the duration of the play I, for one, did not give this opening another thought, so mesmerising was the verbal dual on stage. How chilling, then, to find the action repeated at the closing of the play, and to realize its significance…..
At the play’s opening we find a mild mannered, scatty Professor teaching his bright-eyed pupil that 1+1=2. When the innocent pupil begins to displease the tutor, he turns on her, becoming a bullying tyrant bent on her destruction. Various cryptic entreaties from the Maid fail to have any effect on the Professor and her prophesy that “Arithmetic leads to philology and philology leads to crime” is realised.
The Pupil is brutally done to death in the armchair, which the accommodating Maid wheels offstage….. The language of this play is nonsensical and repetitive, with hypnotic effect. The audience was awestruck by the flawless execution of the text and thoroughly entertained from beginning to end, despite the macabre ending and despite knowing that the play was written as a political protest against Nazi fascism in Ionesco’s homeland, Romania.