In 1948, Eugene Ionesco began writing The Bald Soprano, as he later confessed, almost in spite of himself, for by that tune he had come to despise the theater that he had much loved in his youth. What did intrigue him was the banality of the expressions used in an English-language phrase book. These phrases were the inspiration for this anti-play or parody, "a comedy of comedies." Although he set out to show how human discourse had devolved into a collection of empty platitudes and self-evident truisms, something that he believed was very distressing, his friends found his play very amusing, and they encouraged him to find a theater that would stage it One of these friends, Monique Saint-Come, showed the work to Nicolas Bataille, the director of a group of avant-garde actors working in Paris.