Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✭✩
by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Martin Crimp,
directed by Jim Warren
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
September 2, 2006
Soulpepper has a knack for the Theatre of the Absurd. Following fine productions of Albee, Beckett, Genet, Ionesco and Pinter, comes this excellent production of Ionesco’s The Chairs (1952). Like most of Ionesco’s plays, The Chairs is based on a single metaphor that balloons out of control until it collapses. Here we meet an Old Man (Oliver Dennis) and an Old Woman (Kristen Thomson) isolated in a building on an island in a post-apocalyptic world. Tonight the Old Man will finally reveal his plan to save mankind. Doorbells ring, invisible guests arrive and more and more chairs must be brought out to seat them. Is this just the ancient couple’s folie à deux gone wild? Or is it a bleak view of the relation of artist and audience?
The play, anticipating many situations in Beckett, is a type of pure theatre where the meaningless words are treated musically, the actions choreographically, both steadily building to a crescendo. Director Jim Warren’s staging of the bringing on of fifty chairs is a masterpiece in itself. Dennis is outstanding a wreck of man caught up in an ecstasy of future glory. Thomson is hilarious as the alternately prudish and lascivious wife who eggs him on. They mime so well and make the dialogue sound so improvised, they draw us deeply into their illusory world.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-07-06.
Photo: Cover of Faber & Faber paperback. ©1997
2006-07-06
The Chairs