Director's Note: The Chairs

Director's Note

The Chairs feels, to me, like both a love letter to theatre and a challenge to it. The play insists on the failure of language, the instability of meaning and the limits of art. Yet, in doing so, it creates meaning. While negating itself, it affirms itself.

At its heart is an act of resistance. The Old Man and Old Woman, at the end of their lives, create purpose together in the face of despair. Through love, companionship and invention, they give each other a reason to continue. That fight culminates in one final attempt to leave something behind: a message.

Eugène Ionesco said The Chairs was not a play, but a testament. He described the work as an encounter with the ontological void. Sprung from the image of an empty chair, the play grapples with both the absence that image evokes and the overwhelming anxiety of its proliferation that follows. Rather than moving toward resolution, the play intensifies. It builds, accumulates and overwhelms until it reaches not a resolution, but a confrontation. In that confrontation, there is a kind of release.

Our work has been to embrace these extremes: the excess, the rhythm, the strange theatricality Ionesco calls for. Influenced by the circus, cabaret and silent film, this world is exaggerated, physical and deeply human.

Although we are left with absence, here we are sitting and experiencing together. Thank you for being here.

- Vanessa Stalling, Director of The Chairs