Eugène Ionesco’s single-act play, about a lesson that unravels into baroque violence inflicted by a professor on his pupil, is built on deliberate, head-scratching confusions. It is only in the final moments that it clarifies all the comic absurdity that has come before, with an ending that lands like a sinister punchline. The drama was clearly a reflection on Nazism and the tyranny that pervaded Europe in the years before its 1951 premiere.
A new pupil (Hazel Caulfield) visits a professor (Jerome Ngonadi) whose manner gradually turns from courteous to enraged. The pupil is of uncertain age – she resembles a wide-eyed child yet also has sophisticated, albeit quirky, intellectual rationale for the simple maths exercises he sets her.
