about the Play
The Chairs features the Old Man and the Old Woman, described as 95 and 94 years old respectively, who live in a place that is circular and surrounded by water. The Old Man is a "general factotum" which basically means he is a janitor of the place in which they reside. They are awaiting the arrival of many guests and an Orator who will help the Old Man convey a very important message. However, as the guests arrive the audience finds out that they are invisible. The Orator is real, however, after the Old Man and Old Woman have departed this life, the audience learns that the Orator is mute and cannot convey the message with which he has been entrusted. The Orator leaves the stage, leaving the invisible and visible audience without closure.
Described by Ionesco as a "tragic farce" and by others as a "metaphysical farce," The Chairs opened April 22, 1952 in Paris. The play was met with mixed responses. Many nights Ionesco, his wife and 8-year-old daughter made up the total audience. Samuel Beckett, a fellow absurdist, wrote to Ionesco after seeing the play, "I have just seen The Chairs. I wish to let you know that I was deeply moved." French playwright Jean Anouilh sent theatre-goers who had come to his sold out play down the street to The Chairs saying "it is a dark comedy in the style of Moliere, a madly zany black comedy, scary and quizzical, poignant and always true…It ought to be called a classic."
Ionesco himself said of his play "I wanted this farce to be dramatic, yet remain farcical. Creatures lost in incoherence, imprisoned in a meaningless universe, wrenched from any kind of essential reality, cannot be purely tragic…Above all, I attempted to convey my own feelings as to the unreality of the world." While some walk away from the play, as did the patrons in Lyons in 1952, feeling they had been denied the full actors for the play, Ionesco sought to show absence on stage. He said he wanted to show the absence of people, of thought, of civilization. Edith Whitehurst Williams writes, "Striking the chord of response at the level of guilt, Ionesco succeeds in the exceptionally difficult task of establishing identification with characters whom we must ultimately reject, a type of identification which is fundamental to the confrontation aimed at in the Theatre of the Absurd." Therefore, this play, as an example of absurdist theatre, aims to create confrontation between accepted modes of dialogue and staging and alternate ideas.
Note: at the end of the play the Orator puts up the words ANGELFOOD. Whitehurst writes that it is "a frothy, bodiless substance which significantly does not event contain the meaty, fertile portion of the egg"