Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter in The Chairs
(Picture: Helen Murray)Kathryn Hunter’s performance is the main draw in this rare and laborious revival of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist 1952 play. You can’t take your eyes off her as a clownish nonagenarian literally rearranging the furniture at the end of the world. Otherwise, this knowing, apocalyptic slapstick raises titters rather than belly laughs. Omar Elerian’s meandering production feels like a curiosity for aficionados rather than a triumphant reboot of a classic.
It’s metatheatrical throughout. We first hear Hunter and her real-life husband Marcello Magni, playing actors playing characters called Old Woman and Old Man, arguing over the tannoy about whether to go on or not. “Too may words… it’s a difficult play,” he moans. A stage manager (Toby Sedgwick) shunts them in front of the audience and feeds them confusing props, cues and prompts that they make into an even bigger mess. Imagine The Play That Goes Wrong done by Samuel Beckett, and you’re halfway there.
The prattling couple are supposed to be on a flooded island, though the only clue is the occasional hoot of ships’ horns and a gush of water the Old Man gets in the face when he opens an imaginary window. He’s feeble and defeated, longing for his mother. She’s supportive and loving, but mourning their estranged son. A stream of invisible guests arrives to hear a message to humanity the Old Man has honed over nine decades of honest mediocrity, and the couple struggle to find them seats.
You fleetingly glimpse something profound about loneliness and futility here, in a play written seven years after a World War. There’s a very moving moment when Hunter and Magni, stranded in the middle of a revolving stage full of chairs, embrace tearfully. But the physical comedy largely feels forced, and Elerian’s contemporary tinkerings with the script – including a reworked ending – make the play harder, not easier, to engage with.
It feels rotten to single out Hunter in what is essentially a family affair – she, Magni and Sedgwick started working together with the pioneering company Complicite nearly four decades ago. But she really is spellbinding as the girlish, coquettish Old Woman, nimbly doddery, as loose-limbed as a marionette. She makes the gibberish her character speaks sound truly amusing: and I won’t forget her hilarious, simulated climax with a phantom lothario for a long time.
By contrast Magni, an actor who specialises in anxious fluster, here seems to stumble and reach for words in a way that’s not intentional. Sedgwick, mostly offstage, gets a downbeat, closing monologue ramming home that life, like theatre, is a pretence, while the set collapses around him.
I approached this show with high hopes, based on the track record of the actors, Elerian’s work on Arinze Kené’s award-winning play Misty, and the memory of a triumphant revival of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court in 2007. The reason Hunter stands out in a largely disappointing evening, is that while everyone else draws attention to the arch, in-jokey nature of the affair, she plays each moment with unalloyed conviction. Maybe the secret of absurdism is to play it straight.
