The Chairs
[1] Like Ionesco's earlier play The Bald Soprano (1950), The Chairs belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd, presenting a view of the world as meaningless or without purpose.
Ionesco rejected "realistic" theatre as a trick upon the audience, and instead aimed to make the spectator "participate in an act of imagination which his reason told him was 'absurd'", but which contained all the "nightmarish and contradictory absurdity" of reality.
[4] The play addresses the philosophical idea of "the Absurd", referring to the conflict between the human tendency to seek meaning in life and the inability to find it.
Ionesco suggests that "life is essentially meaningless, progress an illusion and the totality of our experience nothing but a piece of incomprehensible gobbledegook.".
Ionesco's aim is "to create a living version of ‘reality’, sufficiently broad to encompass rational and irrational at the same time".
The accelerating rhythm with which the guests arrive creates a sense of expectation that is deflated by the Orator’s muteness and the incomprehensibility of his written message.
[6] The play was first produced in Paris on 22 April 1952 at the Théâtre Lancry directed by Sylvain Dhomme with Paul Chevalier and Tsilla Chelton.
The budget was so low that, in the hours before the premiere, Ionesco and his producer "were still trying to collect together, by appeals to friendly café-proprietors, thirty-five matching chairs of the right size and appearance".
The first performance in London was in May 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre directed by Tony Richardson starring George Devine and Joan Plowright.
In 1980 Richard Negri directed a production at the Royal Exchange, Manchester starring Gwen Nelson and Frank Thornton.
In 1989 a revival by the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center was directed by Andrei Belgrader with Tresa Hughes, Roberts Blossom and Rodney Scott Hudson.
In 1997 a revival at the Royal Court Theatre in London by Théâtre de Complicité was directed by Simon McBurney, starring Richard Briers and Geraldine McEwan.
This version of The Chairs was presented in London, at the Barbican Center, in Seattle, Washington, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.
In 2022 a revival at the Almeida Thetre, directed by Omar Elerian (who also produced a new translation), starred Kathryn Hunter and her husband Marcello Magni.
[18] In 2023 a revival was staged at the Old Fitz in Sydney, directed by Gale Edwards with Paul Capsis as the Old Woman and iOTA as the old Man.
[19] Its opening in London in 1957 was controversial, arriving soon after the realist drama Look Back in Anger, which had been praised by Kenneth Tynan, as recalled by its leading actress Joan Plowright: Tynan expressed his dislike of Ionesco's nihilistic view that communication between human beings is impossible; and went on to chastise those who championed the playwright's evocative escape from realism.
Ionesco wrote to The Observer in his own defence, claiming a work of art has nothing to do with doctrine and saying that a critic's job was to look at it and decide whether it was true to its own nature.
Devine wrote defending his author's conception of theatre as an art and Orson Welles joined in on Tynan's side, saying "an artist must confirm the values of his society; as he must challenge them".
