The Chairs at the Almeida review: Experimental comedy is a treat
Comedy, as you might have heard, is in crisis. The backlash against Jimmy Carr for his bit about the ‘positives’ of Nazi genocide have thrown petrol on a debate that’s already been raging across the Atlantic, where comedians have increasingly found themselves defending their trade.
This feels like an appropriate backdrop for The Chairs, the first production of Eugene Ionesco’s 1952 comedy in over 25 years. In the hands of director and translator Omar Elerian, this absurdist “tragic farce” becomes a meta, meandering, often infuriating meditation on the very concept of humour. It asks why something is funny – a man falling off a chair, for instance – and chases that thread to its logical conclusions, prodding at the extremities of comedy, where discomfort, boredom and laughter co-exist in a weird state of entropy.
The plot – a work I use reluctantly – revolves around a couple known as Old Man and Old Woman, who live alone on an island after some apparent global disaster. Unused to company, they invite everyone they know to the house to hear a lecture by a renowned scholar, only to panic when people start showing up. Complicité co-founder Marcello Magni stars alongside his real-life wife Kathryn Hunter, the latter fresh from stealing the show in Joel Coen’s recent version of Macbeth (she played all three witches in one of the most arresting performances of last year).
Decked out in wigs, make-up and oversized formalwear, there are nods to Hollywood’s classic clowns, with skits that revolve around mime or physical comedy reminiscent of Chaplain and Hardy (a scene involving a stage filled with chairs is glorious). The guests are all invisible, giving the pair the chance to exercise their physical comedy muscles, and verbal gymnastics are delivered thanks to some Dr Seussian translation. The desperate energy also recalls French absurdist classics such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Mon Oncle.
With the two actors aided only by a largely unseen stage-hand, there’s a sparsity to the production that exacerbates its willingness to drag the audience with it into dramatic lulls that seem to last an eternity, stretching – or outright breaking – the set-up/pay-off comedic formula.
The final act deviates from the original script, with the third man coming to the fore in a fourth wall breaking finale that lays out the play’s intent in a manner not dissimilar to the work of stand-up Stewart Lee.
I’m not sure I enjoyed The Chairs, exactly, but that’s rather missing the point. This kind of experimental theatre rarely enjoys the platform of a theatre the size of the Almeida, and to see Hunter and Magni is a treat all of its own.