Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Sep 5 – Oct 15, 2023
Playwright: Eugène Ionesco
Director: Gale Edwards
Cast: Paul Capsis, iOTA
Images by Phil Erbacher
Theatre review
Stuck in a room for a lifetime, after an environmental disaster many decades ago rendered them helpless, an old couple can only while the days away by talking to each other, in highly imaginative ways. Their isolation leads them to play out a scenario involving guests arriving to keep them company, determined to listen to their many thoughts on what might have been. Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs is characteristically absurd, in thoughtful and profound ways commensurate with the playwright’s reputation.
What the play says, is as much about what the viewer wishes to decipher, as it is about the author’s intentions. Under the direction of a sensitive and astute Gale Edwards, the possibilities for resonance are many. It is a production that reaches for the sublime, wishing to communicate something transcendent with all of its abstractions, yet capable of feeling simultaneously concrete through the sense of reality being offered. Something truthful is being manifested, and we perceive it as such, even though there is a definite freedom in how our personal interpretations are encouraged.
Set design by Brian Thomson evokes a fantastical space, somewhere ephemeral perhaps or timeless, allowing us to have a taste both of 1952 when The Chairs was first staged, and the distant future in which the story happens. Costumes are wonderfully theatrical, with excellent consideration for colours and textures by Angela Doherty providing a certain tactility to how we access the characters. Lights by Benjamin Brockman and sounds by Zac Saric create useful demarcations in the text, so that our intellect can feel elastic and activated, lively in our introspections, from being provoked by what we see and hear.
The exquisite iOTA takes on one of the geriatric roles, delivering nuanced intensity as we are held captive to all the passion and the melancholy being rendered in the most mesmeric ways. The performer’s undeniable presence brings to the piece a soulful quality that invites us to regard the work with sentimentality, and therefore elicits our emotional investment in a story that could easily have been left entirely a cerebral experience. Also glorious is Paul Capsis whose natural whimsy imbues the surreality of The Chair with a poetic beauty, turning our inevitable disintegration into a strange decadence, almost romantic in a depiction of longing, whatever the pining may be for. Chemistry and timing between the two are flawless, reflecting a level of artistry that can only come from exceptional talent and finely honed skill.
Things may be futile, but humans will continue being humans. Our lives mean little in the absence of hope, so we can only carry on doing what we know, even if much of it can seem delusory. It is true however, that humans can make choices that we believe to be constructive or destructive, and the tragedy is that we are capable of doing bad, not only unintentionally, but often completely consciously. The old couple in The Chairs live in a France that has become submerged in water. That is not the entirety of the play, but a detail that screams loud. Yet, turning a blind eye feels utterly easy.
Suzy Goes See 