A bravura take on Ionesco’s absurdist farce
The Chairs
Almeida Theatre, London N1
★★★★★
It’s 25 years since London was treated to a superlative account of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist masterpiece of 1952, in which a nonagenarian couple, marooned on a waterlogged island, play host to a rising tide of imaginary guests, fetching more and more chairs for these invisible visitants to sit on.
That was presented by Théâtre de Complicité, with Geraldine McEwan and Richard Briers as the leads. Now two of Complicité’s best-loved players during its infancy, Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni, both in their early sixties, are incarnating these antiquated figures of last-gasp humanity. Joining the pair – married in real-life – is Toby Sedgwick, another Complicité alumnus.
It’s a pleasure to report that the trio have produced – with h fast- fast rising director/adapter Omar ar Elerian – something that equals the memory of f that 1997 revival, maybe even ven outstrips it. For casually ally brilliant buffoonery and the sweetest of grotesquerie, Hunter r and Magni make an unbeatable doubleact; she’s simian and parodically scuttling, he’s puffed-up yet vulnerable. Elerian takes a pointedly playful approach, rephrasing, with modern nods, Ionesco’s text, and emphasising the theatrical context.
Old-hat though that might sound, the evening’s swag-curtained “staginess” does wonders to unsettle your cosy expectations. Surprises are sprung from the start, when we overhear Magni despairing about going on. His mock-panic filters into his antics on-stage, blurring the boundary between artifice a and reality.
Hunter’s husky husky-voiced attempts to coax on her belov beloved “Crumpet” gain a frisson of genuine marital conce concern, alongside an old trou trouper’s dread of being left in the lurch. We
lau laugh a lot as they pr pretend-converse with, and even sexually cavort with, their insubstantial interlopers, but when they later cling to each other, chairs whirling around as if on an infernal carousel, they convey a piercing sense of engulfing mortality.
The funny-business interruptions from Sedgwick, as a reluctantly intrusive stage-hand, could easily sabotage the classic. Yet they also help to excavate the philosophical profundity beneath the sketch-like simplicity. Life, we see in microcosm, is a series of cack-handed improvisations.
Everything builds in the original towards the symbolically anti-climactic arrival of “the Orator”, but Elerian cleverly scuppers even that neatness, and the production has one more trick up its sleeve to ensure that Ionesco’s chilling vision of existential emptiness is honoured. Bravissimo.
Until March 5. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk