The Chairs by Eugène Ionesco (review)

Wei Feng

Theatre Journal, Volume 71, Number 2, June 2019, pp. 227-229 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/728447

Access provided at 28 Jun 2019 06:19 GMT from UCLA Library


cise of agency, and if Sir Callaghan is something of
a “stage Irishman,” he is of the stalwart and heroic
variety. Many of the original satirical asides still
carry meaning, and some of the jokes in the pre-
amble reference twenty-first-century issues (such
as the bluster of a certain US president). Ultimately,
however, this exuberant and fast-paced production
captured an even rarer quality—it was fun.
RICHARD JONES
Stephen F. Austin State University
THE CHAIRS. By Eugène Ionesco. Directed
by Ni Guangjin. Shanghai Kunqu Opera
Troupe. Beijing Tianqiao Performing Arts
Center, Beijing. April 28, 2018.
In 1982, Eugène Ionesco witnessed a jingju (Beijing
opera) adaptation of The Chairs in Taiwan, but he
offered little comment on the performance, possibly
because it was, according to critics, unsatisfactory.
This dark farce was reduced to a series of dialogues
with little reflection on metaphysics. The adaptor
and performers made few adjustments to jingju’s
conventions to accommodate the peculiar play. Nev-
ertheless, Ionesco was intrigued by jingju’s stylized
movements, which he deemed more beautiful than
realistic theatre. His frustrated expectation antici-
pated a more thoughtfully and carefully designed
xiqu (Chinese opera) rendition of the play. In 2016,
Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe (SKOT) adapted
The Chairs into kunju (Kun opera) at the invitation
of Suzuki Tadashi, who brought together in Toga,
Japan five adaptations of the play by Asian theatre
companies in different styles, for the purpose of a
creative encounter. SKOT wisely took this oppor-
tunity to experiment with new ideas. But given
the previous unsuccessful adaptation in 1982, one
might remain doubtful about the plausibility of an
intriguingly thoughtful integration.
This doubt is not unfounded for another reason.
Most intercultural adaptations in xiqu for the past
decades have preferred more classic plays by Eurip-
ides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and others that share with
xiqu similar or approachable subject matter and
structure. Although such similarities guarantee a
smooth intercultural dialogue, they also preclude
radical innovation. I was caught between excitement
and disquiet when watching The Chairs and won-
dered: could there be alternative strategies for xiqu
to accommodate a so-called absurdist play? How
could Ionesco’s nonsensical piece offer another ap-
proach to expand the artistic boundary of xiqu—in
this case, the 600-year-old kunju?
PERFORMANCE REVIEWS / 227
The play, rewritten by Yu Xiating, was set in feu-
dal China, and Chinese cultural elements, poetic
images, and adages ran throughout. No props ap-
peared onstage except for two red wooden chairs
and two bamboo staffs in the couple’s hands. The
costumes and makeup were traditional, and, while
singing and dance were used, they no longer domi-
nated. The stylized movements were prominent.
All of these familiar conventions struck me as a
common and pleasing kunju piece, but at the same
time, my perception within the traditional frame
was also subtly interrupted and restructured by
Ionesco’s lines and mise en scène, particularly his
treatment of nothingness.
The play opened with the wife’s (Shen Yili) failed
attempts to fetch water with a bamboo basket, while
the husband (Wu Shuang) smiled at her conduct,
saying, “did I not tell you, to fetch water with a
bamboo basket only ends in nothing?” This line was
a variation of a Chinese proverb that means futile
effects. A keen audience would quickly associate the
meaning of this action with the play’s basic tone—
nothingness or emptiness, which Ionesco constantly
emphasizes. What followed were more games to
pass the time. For example, the couple fed each other
with tea and wine, first pouring them in cups, then
offering them to the other, and drinking the cup or
trying to make it cool before drinking—except that
there were no cups, bottle, nor teapot onstage, much
like earlier there had been no basket nor rope in the
wife’s hands. Such a technique, called xuni biaoyan
(virtual acting), defines xiqu. Without extra props,
all of the meaning-making games throughout this
play were conducted with virtual acting, including
in particular the arrival of guests. The couple hit the
floor with their staff to mimic the knocking sound,
but no guests appeared virtually. The invisibility of
the guests was Ionesco’s design. Originally, he in-
tended a full stage of chairs moved by the couple to
contrast the present chairs and absent figures, which
director Ni Guangjin changed by following kunju’s
principles. On an empty stage, the performers used
virtual acting to suggest the guests’ identities and
positions and to move nonexistent chairs for them,
who came from all directions. The crowded house
and busy guests were indicated by the couple’s
indexical movements and accompanied by joyous
percussions.
Virtuosity in these movements should have ap-
peared conventional and appealing, but I neverthe-
less wondered why the couple made the knocking
sounds with their staffs and why the guests would
enter from all directions as if the house had many
doors and no walls. Everything disappeared the mo-
ment they stopped their movements. What was the
purpose of the sudden nothingness? With indices no
longer functioning, nothingness had a role to play
228 / Theatre Journal

Wu Shuang (the old man) and Shen Yili (the old woman) in The Chairs. (Photo: Yang Shengyi.)
 PERFORMANCE REVIEWS / 229

to endow onstage stillness and emptiness with an
inexplicable significance. Taking Ionesco into con-
sideration, the couple resembled magicians trying
to make something out of nothing; everything was
empty—their life, the games, and all the guests—as
the final song of the couple revealed.
The ideas of absurdity, emptiness, and dream are
deeply rooted in Chinese dramatist Tang Xianzu’s
(1550–1616) plays, some of which, with a metaphysi-
cal touch, are fundamental to kunju. In A Dream Un-
der the Southern Bough, he reveals life being similar to
a dream, underscored by Buddhist emptiness, which
often leads to enlightenment rather than despair.
While Ionesco did claim that The Chairs is about
the nonexistence of all characters and the unreality
of reality and that everything is like a dream, the
philosophy underlying nothingness/emptiness in
the kunju adaptation differs from that of the original
play in that it is less pessimistic. Although Iones-
co’s original meaning changed within the Chinese
context, the latter adaptation did help to revive the
metaphysics long repressed in xiqu that tends to
be moralizing and entertaining. Regarding kunju,
the adaptation restored not only its own historical
legacy of philosophy, but also advanced the use of
artistic conventions by giving them a contemporary
interpretive dimension. With another path opened
up for Western high-modernist plays to meet with
xiqu, new theatricalities are worth waiting for.
WEI FENG
Shandong University
THREE TALL WOMEN. By Edward Albee.
Directed by Joe Mantello. Golden Theatre,
New York City. March 13, 2018.
reading of Three Tall Women rendered its bifurcated
structure with wonderful clarity, highlighting the
play’s streaks of both realism and absurdism and
its alternately comic and tragic sensibilities.
The play’s first act presents a relatively realistic
situation: a rich, elderly woman is tended to by a
middle-aged caregiver and visited by a young repre-
sentative of her lawyer. The starkness of the situation
promotes an air of mystery and sterility reminiscent
of Pinter’s No Man’s Land: the old woman (Jackson)
is simply named “A,” the middle-aged woman
(Laurie Metcalf), “B,” and the young woman (Ali-
son Pill), “C.” Miriam Buether’s set design, a plush,
monochromatic bedroom of cream with accents of
soft, green pastels, amply assisted in the creation of
this rarefied atmosphere.
Albee unstintingly depicts the ravages of age. “A”
suffers obvious physical decline—her arm sports
a sling, presumably from a prior fall, and she can
barely walk to the bathroom unassisted—but there
is mental decline as well—it soon becomes evident
that she is coping with some degree of dementia.
Jackson’s ferocious performance rendered “A” as a
lion in winter, raging against the proverbial dying
of the light. She excelled at revealing the struggle
of a sharp mind fighting to retain its diminishing
faculties and all the attendant emotions aroused in
that titanic struggle: the frustration of forgetting,
the joy of remembering, and the subsequent pain
those memories inflict. Jackson, using her mourn-
ful, oboe-like voice to dismiss her underlings with
a withering remark one moment while in the next
devolving into infantile rages or whining, seemed
able to transition effortlessly from imperious self-
confidence to sheer existential terror of her increas-
ing mortality.

Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women received a

much-lauded off-Broadway production in 1994
and earned him a third Pulitzer Prize. Considered
by many to be his late-period masterwork, the play
arrived after a fallow stretch of critical acceptance
and stands as one of Albee’s most autobiographical
works (its slim plot was inspired by his contentious
relationship with his wealthy adoptive mother). Elo-
quently ruminating on issues of estrangement and
mortality, this chamber piece offers three female
actors complex roles effused with Albee’s trade-
mark mordant, rueful wit. Surprisingly, despite
critical acclaim, Three Tall Women had not received
a Broadway production until Joe Mantello’s superb
2018 mounting of it, which featured the return of ac-
claimed British actress Glenda Jackson to the Ameri- Alison Pill (“C”), Glenda Jackson (“A”),
can stage after a thirty-year absence. Mantello’s and Laurie Metcalf (“B”) in Three Tall Women.
(Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.)