Theatre Review: Anti-Realist Theatre

The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco

In these post-modern times, when “relativism rules, OK”, it is perhaps not surprising that audiences seem to crave for experiences which are no longer tied to the signposts and certainties of everyday existence. When meaning becomes suspect and life seems a lottery, in an age of burgeoning individualism the theatre of unreality beckons.

Right on cue the Royal Court has revived one of the plays of a self-proclaimed advocate of explicitly anti-realist theatre, Eugene Ionesco. I remember seeing The Chairs on an earlier outing at the Royal Court (in 1958?). Then it played as part of a double bill with The Lesson, but in these days—when the demands of the market remain unambiguously realistic even if the plays performed are celebrations of anti-reality—it appears as a single piece.

Kenneth Tynan once said of Ionesco’s plays that as with shaggy-dog stories “few survive a second hearing”, but ever the optimist I decided that I needed to test Tynan’s hypothesis for myself. Newspaper critics have been full of praise for the current production, commending the acting of the two principals, and the exciting, if bizarre, events on stage. The action, such as it is, centres on an aged couple who are enveloped in a make-believe world of imagined memories, unable to communicate with themselves or with others. They talk at each other in staccato phrases, inhabitants of a nihilistic world. My memories of that earlier production are of dialogue occasionally touching, sometimes funny, and frequently boring.

Ionesco believed that art is different from and independent of the rest of the world. Whilst most artists are in the business of describing and interpreting the world of which we are all a part, Ionesco thought art independent of the external world. As socialists we would accept that both art and ideology spring from experience, but Ionesco rejected these connections. In doing so he was able to claim that art exists in a world of its own, answerable only to its own laws: a world exempt from value judgments. In deciding whether one of his plays was good or bad, Ionesco suggested that we “simply say whether it is true to its own nature”. Not true to life as we experience it, since our experience counts for nought. In Ionesco’s scheme of things, only the artist’s opinions have value; the only certainties are those which he, the artist, perceives.

Tynan described Ionesco’s plays as “a diversion”. Socialists would agree, but we would go further. Deriving our opinions about the world from a materialistic examination of history, we applaud those plays which reflect life; plays whose characters and events have a clear connection to a world we recognise, Ionesco bids us escape from realism into nothingness; into “a self-imposed vacuum, wherein the author ominously bids us observe the absence of air”. It is an arid, invalid perspective.

I rang the Royal Court and asked for tickets in the next month or so. I was told that none was available, “except for some with a restricted view”. How marvellously apt. I decided that I could deny myself the pleasure (sic) of watching a play with a restricted view, from a seat with a similarly unwholesome perspective.
MICHAEL GILL