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Take a seat

The Company Theatre's production of The Chairs was an unusual journey into the Absurdist tradition

ETERNAL WAIT Some things worked in the play while others did not

The Company Theatre & Evam Youth Forum presented The Chairs written by Eugene Ionesco at Ranga Shankara last week. The play directed by Atul Kumar and staged in Hindi, kicks off as unusually as the Absurdist tradition promises. As the audience walks in to be seated in the auditorium, the characters — an old man and woman — are already on stage, their silhouettes making a striking picture in the brilliant lighting by Atul. The old woman is knitting away as she casually watches the audience walk in and settle down, while the old man is immersed in reading his newspaper, which is absolutely blank.

When the play begins, the woman puts down her knitting and the man his newspaper, ending a preamble that has nothing to do with the play itself. The Chairs is centred on this couple, which lives in isolation in a circular building surrounded by water. Their favourite pastime is to dip into their past and pretend to be surrounded by a sea of people in their present. So the scenes shift between the past and the present.

The woman also switches between being the old man's wife and mother. When she's the wife, she's loving and always prodding him to recollect beautiful memories of the past. But when she becomes the mother she's reprimanding him for being a loser in spite of his phenomenal intellect.

The man, who is a janitor, then proudly reveals to the audience that he's the "master of the mop and bucket". And to prove to his wife that he can make it big even now, he calls all the people in the world — big and small — to hear his great message, "the culmination of a life's wisdom that will save humanity".

But there's a slight hesitation in him, born out of a fear that he may not be able to speak before a large crowd. So he starts marketing the idea of an efficient orator giving a speech about his life and achievements instead. And that's where the fun begins. The two actors — Namit Das and Aisha Raza — create an imaginary world of people. They even have conversations with each one of them that are perfectly comprehensible despite being one-sided. Efficient scripting and convincing acting make every imaginary character come alive on stage.

The stage gets filled with wooden chairs, representing the huge crowd, waiting to hear the orator. Finally there are so many people that the couple have no more chairs, nor even standing room. And they keep making promises to every guest about the efficiency of the orator. The play, on the lines of Waiting for Godot, keeps the audience in suspense about whether the orator will really appear at all.

But in the end the orator does appear. He pulls out a long sheet and struggles to even speak. In fact, his speech is so incoherent that by the end even the orator screams in frustration and gives up the mission of delivering the old man's message, proving all over again that the latter is indeed a failure.

About The Chairs, one of Ionesco's less abstruse works, the playwright himself has written: "It's not the message, nor the failures of life, nor the moral disaster of the two old people, but the chairs themselves; that is to say, the absence of people, the absence of the emperor, the absence of God, the absence of matter, the unreality of the world, metaphysical emptiness. The theme of the play is nothingness."

That loneliness and emptiness did certainly come through quite effectively. The synopsis promised: "The Chairs fills the theatre with wall-to-wall laughter." But with large chunks of the play being left to the audience's imagination, the waves of laughter never quite crystallised. The tough part of the performance was having to grapple with the sudden transformation of the characters, from old to young, accompanied by a mysterious costume change from old ragged clothes to spiffy hotel uniforms. This, one must say, distracted the audience from the play's central theme.

SHILPA SEBASTIAN R.

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