Vincent Craby (continued)

'... If you have any doubt that life and laughter are still to be found in the seminal comedies of Eugène Ionesco, you can't afford to miss Simon McBurney's splendid revival of the Chairs (1951), which is now in a limited run at the John Golden Theatre. The London hit has arrived safely, suffering no mal d'air en route. Its stars are still Geraldine McEwan and Richard Briers, whose performances mesmerised London last season; even its astonishing breakaway set, designed by the Quay Brothers, remains intact.

Ionesco? The Chairs? You thought that they were footnote to history? It's time to reconsider.

The Romanian-born French dramatist, whose other works include, The Bald Soprano (1948) and Rhinoceros (1959) described The Chairs as a "tragic farce". Critics would later associate him with, among others, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter as the playwrights principally responsible for "the theatre of the absurd". A convenient label, perhaps, but a vast over-simplification. The three share scepticism about language as a means of communication, as well as the conviction that man's place in an irrational universe is essentially absurd. After that, each goes his own way.

Beckett's view is cosmic, pared down, minimalist. A master of language, he seems to be working toward a theatre in which language itself will be discarded. Mr Pinter's theatre is particular, grounded in the ferocity hidden within the minutiae of the mundane. More than the others, Ionesco exploits the robustly comic possibilities in the disconnection between reality as understood by his audience and the seriously lunatic circumstances faced by his characters.

At the centre of The Chairs, and virtually alone on stage from start to finish, are the Old Man (Mr Briers), a fussy, somewhat pompous janitor given to self-pity, and his wife, the Old Woman (Ms McEwan), an ancient bag of bones who lovingly supports her mate as if on automatic pilot. He's her "poppet." She's Semiramis, often called "petty-pie."

Some may find The Chairs too funny to be taken seriously, but Ionesco is a grave humorist. The Old Man and Old Woman have been married for centuries, or maybe only 70 years. There is talk about missed opportunities as well as about children, but no consensus whether they ever had any. For all their disagreements, there is something bracing about the tenacity with which they try to make order out of the chaos, about the way they confront the murk of lives no longer remembered. Their intimacy is terminable. The setting: a great, barren, multi-doored space, possibly a lighthouse at the edge of a watery nighttime universe. When the lights come up, the Old Man is looking out of a window, facing the audience. We hear the vice of Old Woman, who warns he might fall in. "Remember what happened to Henry the Seventh", she calls. "Spare me your historical examples", he says not unkindly. "I'm sick to death of Tudor History." In this way the seductive Ionesco hallucination begins.

The Old Man has prepared a message for mankind, his last will and testament, which will be delivered this night to an invited audience by a hired orator. As the hour approaches, the Old Woman frets. Has he invited all the right people? Chemists? Violinists? Troublemakers? Boilermakers? Spin doctors? Post-Marxists? Neo Nazis? Pope Paul and the popular press? The Old Man says he has. Maybe, she suggests, there is still time to cancel the invitations.

Her nervousness infects him, but before they can share that fear, the guests start arriving. They come singly and in small groups, then in a steady stream, finally in a kind of onslaught, like the Normandy invasion. Among them: the Old Man's first love, called "the Fabled Beauty," over whom he swoons as he notes "hair still cascading over the patches of pink scalp." The Old Woman is much taken by the Fabled Beauty's husband and allows him liberties not often exercised in public. There is also the Field Marshal, a boorish type who makes a pass at a serious young woman.

As the guests accumulate, the Old Man greets them and tries to keep order. In a brilliantly choreographed slapstick sequence, the Old Woman moves in and out of the wall of doors with mounting desperation as she attempts - fruitlessly - to meet the demand for chairs. At last, when the stage is wall-to-wall with chairs, the Emperor, called "King of Kings" by the Old Man, makes a dazzling entrance. Though the other guests are invisible, he (or should it be He?) is a burst of blinding light straight into the eyes of the audience.

In addition to the Old Man and Old Woman, the only other actor who appears is the Orator (Mick Barnfather), who turns out to be a mime and a mute.

The Chairs runs barely 90 minutes without an intermission and is usually accompanied by The Lesson, another, shorter, Ionesco piece, McBurney's revival, a co-production of the Royal Court Theatre and the Theatre de Complicite (of which he is the artistic director), is played alone to optimum effect.

In Martin Crimp's excellent English translation, Ionesco's French text works on the mind and emotions like a fugue. "Oh, God," says the Old Man, "It's so hard to put things into words... yet everything must be spoken." Themes are introduced, retired, then reappear in slightly altered form. The old man wants to put his thoughts "into inevitable-sounding words." The Old Woman tries to be helpful, "once you've started, it'll sound inevitable enough - like living and dying."

Mr Crimp's language, which is both precise and marvellously askew, captures what I take to be Ionesco's idea that words have a kind of half life, like uranium. You might think Ionesco had overdosed on American talk radio, the more that words are spoken, the more loosely they are used, the less they mean, their definitions becoming increasingly dim without ever completely disappearing. It's as if we comprehend life through a succession of approximations that fade with time.

Mr Briers, one of England's finest character actors, is superbly comic and moving as a very old man facing the end of a dreary life with uncertain fortitude. When he slips into a crying jag, longing for his mummy, the old Woman slips into her mummy mode and brings him back, if only to be alone.

Most Americans will remember Ms McEwan as the elegant, scheming Lucia in the Mapp and Lucia miniseries. She is almost unrecognisable here as a slovenly, raffish old crone, her hair a thinning fright wig, her body so bendable it seems to be constructed of pipe cleaners.

Watch her as she races about, Groucho-like, fetching chairs, or in a more intimate moment, as she accepts the erotic advances of the Fabled Beauty's husband. Hers is a bold, miraculously funny and complete performance. The voice runs up and down the scales in great swoops of unbridled, matchless theatricality. When she gives the Old Man a peck on the cheek, the kiss can be heard in the top balcony.

Ms McEwan and Mr Briers were made for each other.

Mr McBurney, who staged the Theatre de Complicite's Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol at Lincoln Center two years ago, is clearly another London director to keep track of. Though his production of The Chairs looks effortless, it is actually a most delicate mix of text and performances with hugely complicated sound, lighting and scenic designs. The Chairs is theatre as spectacle in the manner of a fine one-ring circus. It delights the imagination without exhausting the patience.'

Vincent Craby - The New York Times, March 1998