The Lesson

La Leçon, or The Lesson, by French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco, was written in 1950 and first produced in 1951 at the Théâtre de Poche in Paris. It was Ionesco’s second play, a companion piece to his first and best-known work, The Bald Soprano (1950). Both plays are about language and its deconstruction, written by a Romanian immigrant in France who had just begun to learn English. Famously, while copying sentences from an English language textbook, Ionesco was struck by the way language described simple truths: the ceiling is up; the floor is down; there are seven days in a week. He subtitled The Bald Soprano as “a tragedy of language,” and showed how language can be made meaningless through obfuscation and empty dialogue, and that this obfuscation destabilizes truths and identities that seemed indisputable. Shortly after finishing The Bald Soprano, Ionesco wrote The Lesson, which follows this concept down a much darker path, exploring the integral role of language in structures of power and violence. Subtitled as “a comic drama” (43), The Lesson presents humor undermined by horror, destabilizing both the words “comic” and “drama.” These techniques led theatre critic and scholar Martin Esslin to label Ionesco as one of the major progenitors of what he called the Theatre of the Absurd. In The Lesson, language is both nonsensical and a violent tool of control, driving toward the play’s brutal climax. Then the cycle of violence and power begins again. It is not unstoppable—it is just that no one will stop it. The Lesson did not reach the same canonical status as The Bald Soprano, but the two one-act plays are frequently presented together. In 1963, Danish choreographer Flemming Flindt and composer Georges Delerue adapted The Lesson into a ballet that premiered in Paris in 1964, danced by the Royal Danish Ballet, and has since been performed by other major companies.

This study guide utilizes the version of The Lesson included in The Bald Soprano and Other Plays by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Donald M. Allen and published by Grove Press in 1958.

Content Note: The Lesson is a one-act play with no scene divisions. This guide separates the play into two parts for ease of reference and analysis.

Content Warning: The play depicts or mentions physical violence, sexual assault, Nazi imagery, and mentions of suicide.

Plot Summary

A young woman, an 18-year-old student, shows up at a senior professor’s home for a lesson. Marie, the professor’s seemingly always harried maid, answers the door and invites her in. At the start of the play, the nameless student is bright, energetic, personable, and eager to learn. The professor, also nameless, is timid, quiet, and polite, although once or twice, there is a spark of something dark and lurid that quickly disappears. Throughout the play, the student will become gradually weak and listless, and the professor will become aggressive, loud, and powerful. The student wants the professor to help her prepare for oral exams to qualify for a total doctorate degree in mathematics and philosophy. Quizzing her on the location of Paris (the play is set in France) and the names of the seasons, he expresses delight in her intelligence, certain she will excel in her exams. Marie enters to warn him not to progress to teaching arithmetic, but the professor irritably shoos her away. Moving on to arithmetic, he is impressed with the girl’s ability to add numbers under 10. But he becomes frustrated when she cannot grasp subtraction, although she can apparently answer any multiplication question, having memorized every possible equation. He declares that without mathematical reasoning, she will not be capable of more than a partial doctorate, meaning philosophy only.

Marie enters again to warn him not to move on to teaching the student linguistics, but he again scolds and dismisses her. Ordering the young woman to listen to his prepared lecture, the professor gives an increasingly nonsensical speech about languages. The student begins to complain of a toothache, but the professor persists, growing more and more frenzied and angry at the student’s inability to understand and answer his absurd questions. He becomes physically violent and twists her wrist. When the student is nearly drained of her earlier liveliness, now aching all over her body, the professor takes out a knife and brutally kills her. Calming and realizing what he has done, he calls Marie. She is angry, revealing that this is the 40th student he has killed that she has had to bury. He attempts to stab Marie, but she twists his wrist like he twisted the girl’s and stops him. However, she softens, and her anger drains when she asks if he is sorry, and he swears that he is. The professor worries about getting caught with 40 dead students in coffins, but Marie reassures him and gives him an armband with an insignia (possibly a Nazi swastika). If he wears it, no one will bother him. They carry the dead girl out. The doorbell rings. Harried as she was at the beginning of the play, Marie rushes back in to open the door, greet the new unseen student, and invite her in.