also translated as "The Bald-Headed Prima Donna"
"Anti-play" that dramatises the absurdity of human existence.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith chat in clichés about the trivia of everyday life. The meaninglessness of their existence is farcically caricatured in a dialogue in which each member of a large family, living and dead, regardless of age or sex, is called Bobby Watson; to the Smiths, everyone is Bobby Watson. Mr. and Mrs. Martin enter. They converse as strangers but gradually discover that they are both from Manchester, that they arrived in London at the same time, that they live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, and are the parents of the same child.
The Martins and the Smiths then exchange banalities, a clock strikes erratically, and the doorbell rings to announce no one. A fire chief arrives, and although in a hurry to extinguish all fires in the city, he launches into long-winded, pointless anecdotes. After he has left, the two couples talk in a series of clichés until language disintegrates into basic sounds that the four characters utter while running around the room in search of a nameless something. The end of the play completes a circle, the Martins replacing the Smiths in their chairs and beginning to speak the same lines with which the Smiths opened the play.