La lezione

To mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the Teatro San Giovanni Bosco presents "The Lesson" by Eugène Ionesco.

Written in 1951, this play is a masterpiece of the Theatre of the Absurd, transforming a mundane private tutoring session into a claustrophobic nightmare. The story unfolds in the apartment of an elderly professor who is expecting a young female student to prepare her for an advanced examination.

What begins as a polite, bourgeois encounter soon veers into a logical paradox: calculations become impossible, language loses its meaning, and the professor transforms into an aggressive despot—while the student sinks into an exhausted, mute state, oppressed by a recurring, symbolic "toothache."

Although the work was originally conceived as a metaphor for totalitarianism, a contemporary perspective reveals it to be a sharp analysis of gender-based violence and femicide.

The drama is rooted in a patriarchal imbalance, in which male authority uses language as a tool for psychological and physical subjugation. Academic knowledge serves as a facade, masking a sadistic, predatory urge aimed at erasing the young woman’s identity. The presence of the housekeeper makes the mechanism even more unsettling: fully aware of the danger, she becomes a complicit, silent enabler—cleaning up the crime scene and preparing the room for the next victim.

The final murder thus ceases to be an abstract theatrical paradox and becomes a stark, chilling account of a crime born of possessiveness—a cyclical work that may elicit a smile through its surrealism, yet leaves behind a profound sense of existential anguish.