Ionesco, but make it 2026: Bald Republic, at Théâtre La Comédie de Montréal for the 2026 Montreal Fringe, is a 45-minute absurdist satire built as a leaders' debate. Four chiefs, one host, a nation watching, and an unwittingly complicit moderator.
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Bald Republic, at Théâtre La Comédie de Montréal for the 2026 Montreal Fringe, is a 45-minute absurdist satire built as a leaders' debate. Four chiefs, one host, a nation watching, and an unwittingly complicit moderator.
Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve, The Bald Soprano, is a play about language going bald. Stripped, automatic, side-swept, toupée snatched.
Bald Republic started as a 15-minute piece in the Ottawa Fringe youth section in 2024 — fast, a sketch, what Corinne calls "an anti-play," a thing that didn't go anywhere on purpose.
She brought it to Montreal for John Abbott College's professional theatre program, workshopped it for two years. The version opening at La Comédie de Montréal is a full 45 minutes. Same disease, more room to watch it spread.
Most of us who fall for Ionesco at 20 fall for the randomness, the nonsense, the licence to be strange — but D'Arcy fell for the method. The lessons on power and politics are in Ionesco's form, the way he writes dialogue, not just his content.The fascism enters through the way people talk before anyone starts turning into rhinoceroses.
On the origin of the play:
She'd just seen The Bald Soprano performed by friends, "and I was like, this is actually really funny," and "I felt seen by that."
Ionesco wasn't a Parisian whimsicist. He's a Romanian with a Jewish mother who was forever haunted by the slow transformation of the people around him into fascists — loved ones, clever people, almost imperceptibly assimilating Nazi rhetoric into their daily speech.
Ionesco called it la prolifération du langage, meaning that the grammatical skeleton of an argument keeps functioning as logic long after the logic has left. D'Arcy resurrects this but with Zoomer speech and the ambient stupidity of the current moment.
Bald Republic. The premise is four leaders, one host, a debate that goes nowhere. D'Arcy on where it ends up:
You try to shut an extremist down on stage, you'll find what you've actually done is book him: a televised comeback is airtime for the enemy. Don't feed the trolls was decent advice right up until the trolls started running for office.
A televised debate hands every contestant the same slab of time whether or not there's a thought behind it, so it rewards the loudest, and no, worse than that, it can't tell what's loud from what's true. Corinne, plainly:
On the satirical method:
The media has shaped the play as much as the theatre has.
I asked her whether having a TikTok changes how you write political theatre.
The lazy move is to call him a prophet, to say he saw the feed coming. He didn't see anything. He found a mechanism that lives in the shape of how we talk which recurs no matter what the decade is wearing. D'Arcy:
On Rhinoceros, which she wrote a school essay on:
I've witnessed loved ones in the rabbit hole, and it is scary as hell. The voice changes before the politics do, the fanaticism creeps in like a horn, and you understand that you can't argue them back, because they've stopped making an argument and started performing a transformation.
And this is where she's most Ionesco and most herself at once: she will not tell you who's right. The play makes fun of the whole stage, not a wing of it. She spent years scared of the parts that bite — "I was often very scared, as a younger playwright, to offend people" — and has grown out of it:
D'Arcy's play opens this Friday. Her director's note, which she got from a professor at John Abbott, is the line I left the room holding:
Auteur.trice et metteur.euse en scène | Playwright and director: Corinne D’Arcy
Concepteur.trice | Designer: Sky Gendron, Sadie Leigh Bennet, Harley Finkel
Régisseur.euse.s | Stage Manager.s: Lexie Routhier, Claire Cousineau
Dramaturge: Sebastien Cimpaye
Graphiste | Graphic Designer: Mari-Lou Bujold
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