There’s nothing more delightful than running out of chairs at a party. Running out of chairs means you’ve collected more friends than you thought you had, and you’ve got to solve the puzzle of how to sit them all down at your table. It’s a delight tinged with a kind of horror – what if the guests never stopped arriving?
Written one year before Beckett’s absurdist classic Waiting for Godot, Eugène Ionesco’s 1952 play The Chairs gives a seemingly endless array of guests (and chairs) to an “Old Man” and an “Old Woman” with “a great message” to share with humanity – at a party, of course. Outside their tower, the world is underwater. Inside the tower, time stretches on. All they have is each other, for better and worse.
[Capsis and iOTA] give the kind of performances that end in sweat-drenched faces and rapturous applause
Gale Edwards directs legendary performers Paul Capsis and iOTA in a gender-bent depiction of the central couple, using Martin Crimp’s translation of the French text. Capsis and iOTA are dressed in beige rags designed by Angela Doherty, gradually transferring into beaten-up party clothes with haphazardly applied red lipstick and white face paint. Their eyes are ringed with black, enhancing the absurdity of their ridiculous facial contortions.
Punctuating their rhythmic exchanges of nonsense are short moments where the light brightens and both characters stare directly into the audience, filled with a terror we can only guess at the source of. Capsis’s Old Woman is constantly, warmly coddling iOTA’s ever-fretting Old Man; both performers have a wonderful sense of the outrageous comedy and terrible sadness in Ionesco’s words. They play off each other with visible delight in each other’s brilliance, giving the kind of performances that end in sweat-drenched faces and rapturous applause.
The tower in this production is designed by Brian Thomson, made up of a brick-red circular platform and matching red brick walls. Instead of being carried on from offstage, the chairs begin around the edges of the platform in various shades and styles, hung on ladders or in various states of disarray – these pieces of furniture are just as much characters as the two performers sitting between them. In the top left-hand corner of the back wall hangs a wonky TV screen taped into place, running a blurry live feed of the action onstage that could be its own silent film running in the background. Lights and sounds by Benjamin Brockman and Zac Saric signal transitions between moods, and give the effect of windows in the tower or people in the chairs. Almost nothing leaves the stage throughout the performance, which brings a heightened claustrophobia to the play’s events.
Recommended: Gale Edwards talks about bringing The Chairs to the Old Fitz
More than just a chance to watch some masters of the mop and bucket at work, The Chairs leaves great room for a director and their team to create new meanings in a 51-year-old play. Staging The Chairs today brings to light the fact that the world is falling apart more than it was even in 1952. Whether that be through impending climate crises or the fall of capitalism, our language still fails to help us communicate with each other about what we’ve learned along the way.
Without declaring it timeless, the gaps Ionesco leaves in the meaning of his words allows the play to hold as much or as little as you’d like to take from it – after all, there’s only so much you can expect to be told before you have to reach back and contribute to the conversation yourself. This production also has a more than subtle queerness to it, with Capsis and iOTA’s cabaret approach to the “life partners” they portray, a parallel universe to their turns as Riff Raff and Frank-N-Furter in the 2008-2009 Australian production of The Rocky Horror Show, also directed by Edwards. It adds new depth to the sense that the Old Woman and Man feel that they have lived their lives “wrong”; struggling to make something of themselves or even to perform their gender “correctly” (whatever that means).
The Orator, whom the Old Man hires to deliver his great message to humanity, takes the form (spoiler alert) of a perfectly blonde, high cheek-boned AI-generated man. He looks “correct”, in the straightest way possible, and even he struggles to deliver on his only task. This new take on the ending opens up another new conversation, one about whether we can trust AI to deliver our messages for us, and the role we let robots play in our lives.
The Theatre of the Absurd is best known for its seemingly opaque meaninglessness that searches for something beyond words. The Chairs is one of the more approachable and optimistic of the genre that’s as funny as it is terrifying (we must imagine Sisyphus happy!). After all, what’s funnier than the end of the world? Especially when it’s performed by two of Australia’s best cabaret clowns, in a tiny basement theatre under a pub. If this is yelling into the void, we’re having a great time doing it – so pull up a chair!
The Chairs plays at Old Fitz Theatre, Wolloomooloo, until October 8. Tickets start at $55 and you can snap up yours over here.