Jack, or The Submission
one-act play
Jack, or The Submission (French: Jacques ou la soumission) is an absurdist play by Eugène Ionesco, the first of two about Jack and his family (the second being The Future is in Eggs), all of whom are named after Jack (Father Jack, Mother Jack, etc.).
The thrust of the narrative involves Jack's arranged marriage to Roberta and, when the first Roberta is not satisfactory, Roberta II. The play contains nonsensical exchanges and strings of clichés, similar to The Bald Soprano, and the sort of surreal conceits (Roberta's multiple noses, for example) common in many of Ionesco's later plays.
References
Allen, Donald M., trans. 1958. The Bald Soprano and Other Plays: The Bald Soprano; The Lesson; Jack, or The Submission; The Chairs. By Eugène Ionesco. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1982. ISBN 0-8021-3079-8.
“Jack, or The Submission” enters the record as one-act play. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jack, Submission and one-act can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1247980. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1958 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jack, or The Submission” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.