Dada on stage

The Chairs

★★★★★

• What: Drama
• Where: Almeida Theatre
• When: Until March 5th 2022
• Cost: From £5 for under 25s

“The problem with doing nothing is that you don’t know when you have finished”

Kathryn Hunter delivered one the most hypnotizingly uncanny performances of the year as the three witches in Joel Coen’s film version of The Tragedy of Macbeth. She is a performer whose virtuoso talent can only be witnessed in person. Her immense physical presence, despite being just over five feet tall, is nothing short of utterly mesmerizing to watch; each expression is precisely rendered but made to look effortless. Her jelly like face jolts with jubilation and scrunches with contemplative confusion at her husband’s, played by Marcello Magni, lyrical and metaphysical musings courtesy of Omar Elerian’s new translation of Eugène Ionesco The Chairs.

Magni and Hunter’s shared emotional intelligence and physical prowess as clowns is so brilliant that they are able to imbue each of the titular chairs, inanimate objects, with a living presence of their own. Each block of wood is alive and breathing as if they were a character there in the room with them, with us, with me. With each added chair, a chorus of life emerges on stage, despite there only being three performers. The almost two hour run time glided by.

Theatre of the Absurd can be dense and difficult to digest. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was famously described as a play where “Nothing happens twice.” But Elerian’s text is polished and light, fluttering like a little bird from philosophical rants to witty one liners about Covid. The decision to not put Ionesco on a pedestal is crucial in keeping the production fresh. The 20th century French Romanian playwright’s words have been cleaved from the page and delicately reconstructed. The thought of slicing up Shakespeare is heretic for many British theatre makers. The result is a version inspired by the original than anything else, but this is what makes the production so poignant and entertaining. The Speaker, a mysterious third character whose arrival has been eagerly awaited by Magni and Hunter played by a hilariously bemused Toby Sedgewick, delivers a deliberately anticlimactic and haphazard monologue brings Ionesco kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Surveillance Capitalism? Society of the Spectacle? What does it all mean? But Elerian is not didactic. He does not want his audience to realise anything in particular, but rather invites them to find a meaning for themselves. At a time when a significant number of productions wear their political perspectives on their sleeves, the Almeida’s production of The Chairs emerges as unique, not in that it is apolitical, but rather anti-political. It is dada on stage and it is gorgeous