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Reg. No.: 2011/011959/07
THE CHAIRS BY EUGENE IONESCO
Learning objectives
After studying this section (this guide, as well as the learner book), you should be able to:
● Analyse The Chairs according to the dramatic principles.
● Understand the context and background in terms of sociopolitical, religious, economic, artistic and historical events relevant to the play as well as understanding the relevance to Theatre of the Absurd
● Know more about the dramatic principles / staging characteristics / design elements of staging this play, how this text is interpreted and staged (direction and design) and understand the audience reception (past and present).
Introduction
In this section we analyse the text of The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco.
Important terminology
Term
Absurd
Definition
Adjective: utterly or obviously senseless, illogical or untrue; contrary to all reason or common sense; laughably foolish or false.
Noun: the quality or condition of existing in a meaningless and irrational world.
Deaf Lacking the power of hearing or having impaired hearing.
Dais
A low platform for a lectern or throne.
Eponymous (of a person) giving their name to something. (of a thing) named after a particular person or group.
Elucidate Make (something) clear; explain.
Mute
A deaf person who lacks the ability to speak.
Nebulous Vague or ill-defined.
Nihilistic
Rejecting all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless.
Term
Definition
Non-sequitur A conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.
Ontological void Ontology, as a branch of philosophy, is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects. It seeks classification and explanation of entities. The Void is the philosophical concept of nothingness manifested.
Read the text of The Chairs, study the notes in this guide and ‘Journey 7’ in your Via Afrika Dramatic Arts Learner’s Book. You may also benefit from watching the play on YouTube, after having read the text. There are several versions of the play on YouTube.
The playwright – Eugene Ionesco (1909–1994)
Eugene Ionesco was one of the major figures in the Theatre of the Absurd, the French dramatic movement of the 1940s and 1950s that emphasised the absurdity of the modern condition as defined by existential thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre. The existentialists believed that ‘existence precedes essence’ – that man is born into the world without a purpose and he must commit himself to a cause for his life to have meaning.
Eugene was born in 1912 to a French mother and a Romanian father. He spent most of his childhood in France and moved to Romania as a teenager. In Eugene Ionesco Revisited, author Deborah B. Gaensbauer describes Ionesco’s singularly transformational experience which took place in France when he was a young boy. He describes that he was walking in the sunlight under a blue sky, when he experienced a sudden luminosity. He felt a sensation of floating off the ground and experiencing great peace within himself. Upon returning to the ground, he suddenly perceived the world completely differently – full of dirt and decay, corruption, and meaningless action. This juxtaposition of euphoric peace with meaningless reality would come to influence his life and work.
His parents divorced after they moved to Romania, and he eventually studied French literature at the University of Bucharest. Ionesco married Rodicia Burileanu and they had a daughter together. During World War II, the family moved back to France, eventually settling in Paris.
Ionesco would go on to become a critically acclaimed playwright, but he didn’t speak English until the age of forty. Whilst learning the language he found inspiration in simple sentences constructed by simple words which struck him as alternatively profound, mysterious, tragic and hilarious. He wrote The Bald Soprano, one of his most famous works, to satirise the construction of a middle-class family
trapped in a world defined by meaningless formalities and stale routines. The play borrowed its phrasing from English language-instruction books. To his surprise the tiny production received critical praise, helped inspire the Theatre of the Absurd and catapulted the middle-aged man into a vibrant writing career.
The Chairs is amongst his most famous works and he classifies it as an anti-play, because it breaks theatrical traditions of plot and sequence, showing a modernity which was before its time. The play explores mortality and existential conundrums with fanciful and often fantastical humour.
“Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of movements and gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.” - Eugene Ionesco
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In 1962, Martin Esslin identified Ionesco as a leading writer in the Theatre of the Absurd Amongst others like Beckett, Genet and Adamov, they shared concerns about life’s meaning – or rather, it’s meaninglessness. These writers challenged traditional theatrical models and revolutionised the art of writing. Ionesco wrote about challenging the traditional premise of theatre and how it had existed until then. He wanted theatre to be more interactive and described his view of an imagined truth that can be much more interesting than realistic theatre. In criticising realism and Brechtian theatre, he separated himself from many contemporaries.
Eugene Ionesco
Overview
Eugene Ionesco wrote The Chairs in 1952 and called it a ‘tragic farce’. The play was performed for the first time on 22 April 1952 at the Theatre Lancry in Paris. The budget for the production was so low that hours before the premiere, Ionesco and his producer were still trying to collect thirty-five matching chairs (of the right size and appearance) from friendly café proprietors in Paris. The production was revived in 1956 at the Studio des Champs-Elysees, directed by Jacques Mauclair, and again in 1957 at The Royal Cour Theatre in London. The play was performed again in the 80s and 90s in England, India and the United States of America, and experienced a bit of a revival with various productions in the 2000s and 2010s.
The Chairs follows an elderly couple who pass their time in an abandoned seaside building playing private games and telling each other half-remembered stories. Adrift in a world of their own, the Old Man resolves to convey his wisdom to a lifetime of friends, but while the Old Woman frantically sets out chairs, all their invited guests appear to be imaginary.
The Chairs, originally titled The Orator, was initially received with some controversy in its initial runs. The audience stormed out during a production in conservative Lyons and later there were evenings when the only audience members were Ionesco and his family. The play received generally harsh reviews at first, with one critic writing, ‘The author himself succumbed under the weight of the incoherence he decries.’ However, a few championed the play, including Samuel Beckett, claiming to have been ‘deeply moved’ by the drama. One critic called The Chairs ‘hauntingly beautiful and perfectly structured under its surface of incoherence.’
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When the play was later revived in Paris in 1956 it was met with more appreciation with one critic writing, ‘Every Parisian who loves theatre will blush one day when he’ll have to admit at a social gathering that he missed The Chairs … I myself believe it to be superior to Strindberg; it is a dark comedy, in the style of Moliere, a madly zany black comedy, scary, quizzical, poignant and always true … It ought to be a classic.’
If Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano establishes the frivolity of conversation, then The Chairs is about how conversation serves a purpose by both filling, and thereby exposing, a hole. Ionesco described the theme of this work as ‘the ontological void’. Ionesco is trying to express the void by means of language, gesture, acting and props. To express absence and the unreality of the real.
Theatrical and literary devices
Genre Absurd, tragic comedy
Characters Old Man, Old Woman, Orator
Climax
The climax occurs when the Old Man and Old Woman commit suicide, and the Orator unintelligibly attempts to deliver the message
Protagonist Old Man
Antagonist
There is no direct antagonist, though the Old Man’s inability to deliver his own message is his primary obstacle.
Setting (time) Unclear and unimportant
Setting (place) A house or tower on an island
Structure
Point of view
Falling action
Foreshadowing
One-act play
As it is a play, there is no distinct point of view, but the audience empathises with the Old Man
The invisible crowd makes noise after the Orator leaves
The Old Woman warns the Old Man not to fall out of the window at the beginning of the play
Tone Absurdly comic, philosophical
Motifs
Symbols
Self-conscious theatricality
Semicircular stage, the empty chairs, the Orator, the water, the doorbell
Sociopolitical background and historical context
In 1952, France was still recovering from the devastating impact of World War II, which had ended less than a decade earlier. There was a lingering sense of political, social, and economic uncertainty.
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During the German occupation of France during World War II, Germany had exploited much of France’s raw materials and food, and severely disrupted their transportation system. There were also severe restrictions on French people’s civil liberties. Even though many reforms were put in place after the war, governmental instability led to uncertainty in France. In 1952, for example, there were three French political leaders and many economic problems, including tax increases and high inflation. France’s economic problems were also compounded by its involvement in the Korean War, as part of the United Nations.
In the 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd, Hungarian dramatist and scholar Martin Esslin coined the eponymous term as a device to begin discussion about an important development in contemporary theatre. A development so important that he felt it necessary to define a group of work by authors whose plays shared similar
characteristics and were making significant contributions to the discussion about the present situation of Western man. The Theatre of the Absurd was his elucidation on this new movement, which he felt had the potential to provide new ideas, new approaches and a new vitalised philosophy to transform the modes of thought and the feeling of the public at large. According to Esslin, playwrights associated with Theatre of the Absurd, include Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco, amongst others. However, it must be stressed that these dramatists do not form part of any self-proclaimed movement. Some of them rejected the ‘Absurd’ label and gravitated towards terms like ‘Anti-Theatre’ or ‘New Theatre’. Nevertheless, they had a great deal in common, as their works reflect the preoccupations, anxieties, emotions and thoughts of many of their contemporaries.
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To understand the foundations of Absurdism, one needs to have a basic conception of their philosophies. To understand more fully, you must view their beliefs against the background of the times – a period just after World War II. People were struggling physically and emotionally, trying to recover from a traumatic period in history in a climate of economic deprivation and, in many cases, a collapse or overturning of familiar and accepted standards, norms and values. In short, may people felt that they were living in a world gone mad, where everything had changed, and nothing familiar and stable was left to hold onto. They were disillusioned, especially in the Allied countries. They had won a war at great cost, but the world was certainly not the better place they had hoped for. The aftermath was not one of triumph and a better lifestyle. Instead, they faced unexpected and unforeseen problems and hardships, and many people felt bitter and disillusioned.
Into this climate, where people’s religious and moral beliefs had, in many instances, become shaky, the teachings of the existentialists felt like gentle rain on parched soil. Existentialism is a philosophy which rejects metaphysics and focuses on the existence of the individual in the world. The existentialists saw the world as nihilistic. In other words, they rejected all traditional, accepted values and institutions. In this nihilistic world, individuals have freedom and only their existence is real to them. Each individual is responsible to others for his actions only insofar as they have an impact on others, and the individual is his/her only judge.
The aftermath of World War II and the alienation of people in the modern world provided the environment that allowed for the development of absurdist views. In his 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, the French philosopher Albert Camus described the human condition as essentially meaningless and absurd. According to Camus, the world cannot be explained by reasoning anymore and therefore becomes unfamiliar, leaving people feeling hopeless and like strangers. The divorce between the people and their lives constitutes the feeling of absurdity.
According to Esslin, ‘absurd’ originally was a musical term meaning ‘out of harmony’, while he also states its dictionary definition: ‘Out of harmony with reason or propriety; incongruous, unreasonable, illogical’. Ionesco defined Absurd as ‘That which is devoid of purpose.’
Plot summary
The Chairs opens on a dimly lit, semi-circular stage, with the Old Man sitting on a stool, looking out the window. His wife, the Old Woman, tells him to close the window and says she gets dizzy from being on their island house. She worries that he will fall out of the window, and pulls him in and takes him towards two chairs. The Old Man sits on her lap while the Old Woman works to calm him, reminding him that he has a message to deliver and asking him to tell the story of his life, something she asks him to do every night. He retells the story, and they repeat phrases from the story until the laughter dies down. He cannot recall many things and admits he has difficulty expressing himself. He becomes excited when he remembers that he has a message to deliver and gets up and starts to pace. The Old Woman tells him how talented he is and that he must share his message with the world. The Old Man reveals that he has hired The Orator to deliver his message.
We learn that his message will be conveyed to many important people that evening. The doorbell rings and the first guest arrives. All the guests are invisible. The first guest to arrive is The Lady. The couple makes small talk with this invisible woman and gets her a chair. The second guest arrives: a Colonel who gets seated next to the Lady. The doorbell rings again and two more guests arrive: Mrs Lovely and her husband, the Photographer. The Old Woman makes grotesque sexual gestures towards the Photographer while the Old Man makes it known that he had been involved with Mrs Lovely in the past.
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The Chairs, performed by the Bulandra Theatre.
More invisible guests arrive and the Old Woman, who has been fetching everyone’s chairs, can’t keep up. She gets frustrated by the Old Man’s demands. She doesn’t even know who the guests are, but her husband is too busy to introduce them properly or explain who they are and why they are important. The next guests arrive and they have children with them. This upsets the old couple, but they try to seat them just the same. As more invisible guests arrive, the Old Woman’s hunt for chairs becomes comical. When she runs out of chairs, she begins to sell programs and snacks. The invisible guests are forced to stand against the wall. The ‘crowd’ is so massive at this point that the couple must shout to locate one another across the room. They continue to make small talk, assuring the guests that the message will be delivered in a few moments.
There is a loud noise, and the main door opens. A powerful light floods in as the invisible Emperor arrives, and the couple is shocked that such an important man is in their house. The invisible crowd gives the Emperor the best seat in the house. The couple worry that the Orator hasn’t shown up yet as he is supposed to deliver the message. They keep reassuring themselves that he will show up at any moment. Finally, The Orator arrives. Unlike the other guests, he is a real person and dressed as a nineteenth-century artist. The Orator has an air of importance as he signs autographs for the invisible crowd and takes his seat on the dais.
The Old Man thanks his guests for coming and tells the Emperor that his life will not have been in vain after his message has been shared with them. Finally, the Old Man thanks his wife and then, after one last praise of the Emperor and making it known that him and his wife can now happily die knowing that his message (and philosophy) will be delivered by the Orator, the Old Man and Old Woman jump out of the window and commit suicide.
The Orator begins to speak, but he is mute and deaf and can only make unintelligible sounds as a form of communication. To try to communicate the message, he writes a few meaningless letters and words on the chalkboard. He finally leaves after not getting the reaction from the crowd that he was hoping for and the noise of the invisible crowd marks the end of the play.
Read a full plot summary and analysis here:
Characters
Old Man
The Old Man is 95 years old and married to the Old Woman. He works as a handyman/ caretaker/factotum (an employee who does all kinds of work) on the unnamed island where they live. He has waited forty years to unveil his profound message to the world. To that end, he and his wife have invited many important guests and even hired an orator to announce the message. Yet, the old man seems confused on the big night: he almost falls out the window, he sits on his wife’s lap like a child, he calls for his mother at one point and he directly contradicts some things his wife says. We get the idea that he did not live up to his potential, because his wife repeatedly said he could have been a great many things and in charge of something, ‘You could have been a General Decorator, a General in the Navy, or a General Factotum’; ‘You’re so clever. If you’d had just a little ambition in life, you might have become a General Editor, an Attorney-General, a General Postmaster-General …’
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He believes his life of suffering will translate into a ‘message’ that will save humanity. But his message fails – the deaf and dumb Orator can only mumble the words and spell out nonsensical ones. The failure of this lies less with the Orator than with the Old Man himself. The existential philosophers argued that man’s condition was absurd and meaningless unless he committed himself responsibly to the greater good. The man believes his life will become meaningful with his message, but he has lived an irresponsible life. He relieves himself of the blame for his fights with his brother and friends, and his double suicide with the Old Woman is a retreat from death, not a confrontation with it. He also indulges in the fantastic illusions he and his wife create to escape from reality,
The Old Man (played by David Sinaiko in The Cutting Ball Theater’s 2013 production of The Chairs) reveals the major trials and tribulations of his life to the Emperor.
and though he claims his life has been well lived, he clearly regrets not having taken up with Mrs Lovely. He has also been a neglectful parent and son, abandoning his dying mother and failing his son. His final touch of irresponsibility is his inability to deliver the message himself and then relying on an Orator who is unable to do so as well.
The Old Man also seems bored of his repetitive existence. He has told the same story to his wife every night for their seventy-five-year marriage, and his day is filled with routine. Life is so cyclical for him (just like the cyclical nature of many Absurd pieces) that he seems to be confused about his age. Even though he is 95, he defers tremendously to his superiors and acts in an infantile way (sobs and sits on his wife’s lap, and refers to himself as an orphan). This confusion over beginnings and endings is understandable, since he cannot even recall details of when he and his wife were cast out of a garden many years ago – an allusion to the Garden of Eden, another prominent ending of one godly world and initiation into a human world.
Ultimately, we can view the Old Man as Ionesco’s projection of his own literary frustrations. Ionesco has, in the same way as the Old Man, toiled on his message, built from his life and philosophy, and the actors (or the Orator) do not understand his work and cannot portray it the way Ionesco meant for it to be portrayed – rendering it meaningless. On the other hand, the Old Man is an irresponsible coward afraid and unable to deliver his message himself, and Ionesco may be launching selfcritique here.
Key characteristics/descriptions of the Old Man: Irresponsible, cowardly, never reached possible full potential, infantile, false sense of importance.
Old Woman
The Old Woman is 94 years old and married to the Old Man. A supportive and mothering presence, she believes that her husband is brilliant and could have been much more than a handyman. She is a comforting presence to him and plays the role of his surrogate parent, rocking him on her lap while he sobs about his orphanhood. She also protects him by pulling him back when he leans over too far out the window. She praises him for his stories, imitations and mental faculties. She is, however, also his workhorse, getting chairs and selling programs.
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The Old Woman (Tamar Cohn) converses with the first party guest, a young lady, while The Old Man (David Sinaiko) pulls out a chair for her.
But underneath this calming exterior is a woman who is deeply unhappy with what her life has become. She asks him to tell stories so she can forget the repetitive nature of their existence. She doses herself with salt each night, so she loses the memory of the story, which is more extreme evidence of her need to escape, as is her participation in their fantasy world of imaginary characters.
She is also demanding, making the Old Man repeat stories he has told countless times. Although she is supportive of the Old Man, she also sometimes undermines him. Just as the first guest is about to arrive, the Old Woman admonishes him when he shows a moment of insecurity. We also see this quality when she reminds her husband of what he could have become and that he could have been more in life had he tried harder.
When she is introduced to an attractive man, her sexual frustrations emerge as she makes inappropriate sexual advances and obscene gestures to the photographer. Yet, in the end, she proves she is loyal to the Old Man when she commits suicide with him.
She also harbours much pain over their son’s departure. While the story does not make much sense, as the boy accused them of killing birds, his final words, ‘it’s you who are responsible’, summarise the woman’s and man’s irresponsible life, in which they take little accountability for the past and try to escape the present. While she chastises her husband for not owning up to his fights with family and friends, she is also implicitly guilty, as her suicide with her husband is a retreat from death, from a direct and responsible confrontation with it.
Key characteristics/descriptions of the Old Woman: Mothering, frustrated, dissatisfied, workhorse, supportive, demanding, undermining.
The Orator
The Orator is a virtual actor who has been hired by the Old Man to deliver his message to the invisible crowd. He is approximately 45–50 years old and dressed as an ostentatious, nineteenth century artist. He signs autographs, makes grand gestures with his hands and he skims past the crowd as if only he exists. This is almost true, literally, since everyone else but the Old Man and Woman are invisible, but he believes they are all there. The Old Man has put all his hopes into the Orator’s delivery of his ‘message’, since the Old Man cannot express himself well. But the Orator turns out to be deaf and mute, and the message, as both spoken and written words, is unintelligible. The reason for this is because the Old Man has not taken responsibility for his life and for the delivery of the message, and thus the message becomes irrationally absurd, but Ionesco probably intended another meaning.
