The Chairs

by Eugène Ionesco

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 2 March 2022

Omar Elerian directs his own adapted translation of Ionesco's 1952 play Les Chaises, in which an Old Man (Marcello Magni) and his wife (Kathryn Hunter) prepare for the arrival of a Speaker (Toby Sedgwick) who is to articulate the Old Man's important message to a specially invited audience. As more and more guests arrive the Old Man and the Old Woman become involved in arcane conversations while trying to set out enough chairs to seat everybody before the Speaker himself arrives.

The absurdist element to this play is that none of the guests is visible, so all the remarks they might be making have to be inferred from the reactions and replies of the old couple. Their conversation with each other mixes banality, exasperation and affection, and the situation veers between farce and total incomprehension. The Speaker, when he finally arrives, cannot speak.

In this production, designed by Cécile Trémolières and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen, the stage is initially masked by draped light blue curtains, which when opened reveal a space also hung with swaggd material. It gives the effect of a down-at-heel old-fashioned proscenium stage, suitable perhaps for the slightly hysterical music-hall turns of the elderly couple. A doorbell sounds noisily to announce the arrival of guests, but sometimes it is on the left and somethimes on the right. Neither the Old Man nor the Old Woman seems at all perplexed by this anomaly.

Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter (husband and wife in real life also) are masters at the art of conveying absolute attention to their predicament in a double act that holds the audience's attention through all the grotesquerie, giving hints of the tragedy that lies behind their evident loneliness and their desperate attempts to allay it. He is dressed smartly in intention, but somewhat dishevelled, while she looks like an overgrown and at times disturbingly wizened child. As these two actors have long been associated with the Complicité tradition there are some wonderful sight gags with imaginary and real props throughout the performance.

The adaptation departs in some significant respects from the original. It begins with an overheard conversation in which Magni is apparently suffering from stage fright and refusing to go on. It ends with a long rambling disquisition by Toby Sedgwick in his own persona on the playwright's intentions, and the way they have been subverted by the 'accident' of his being mistaken as one of the late arriving guests, rather than as the Speaker himself. And in the middle of the performance the fourth wall is deliberately broken as two members of the audience are invited onto the stage to help greet the guests. There is of course much fun to be had with this ploy, since the Old Man can confidently reprimand one of these helpers for tripping over a guest, or for holding out a hand to someone who is plainly not there.

The final monologue defuses the manic energy of what has gone before, but it was a great opportunity to see one of the defining works of Absurdist drama revived by a stellar double act.