Ionesco Unveiled: A Visit to Mr and Mrs Smith, Installation

Come to a secret location in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where an immersive performance promises to a mad hatter's tea party of absurdist theatre.

The piece is a highlight of the InTransit season, a festival of art in unexpected places, which is now in its tenth year. It's inspired by the life of Eugene Ionesco (1909 - 1994) , the founder of the Theatre of the Absurd, the movement that shaped Samuel Beckett's writing.

Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright and his first play was inspired by the profound truths he claimed to discover by the simple act of learning English, aged forty. He became fascinated with the lives of the characters in his English workbook, a certain 'Mr and Mrs Smith.'

Though their lives were quite literally textbook examples on banality he found meaning in their lives, and their stiff, factual sentences to each other: enough to write a play, La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) which was later championed by writers and critics.

Theatre director Marianne Badrichani and her company have turned Ionesco's revelation into an immersive bilingual experience, a 'very English evening' at the house of the Smiths. You get a cup of tea and all seems well, but, as with much absurdist theatre, there are some unexpected surprises planned.

Badrichani sources French works that will work well for London audiences. Her last play in London, Trois Ruptures/ Three Splits appealed to English and French speakers alike and her latest venture will be a similarly bilingual experience.
So drop in for a drop of tea... you'll almost certainly get more than you bargained for!