"The Chairs" by Eugene Ionesco has been staged in Persian by the well-known actor and director Mohammad-Ali Behboudi, who brought the play out in Cologne for the 24th Iranian Theatre Festival. (Premiere 11/21/17). Now the production will also be shown in Frankfurt with German surtitles.
'The Old Man' and
.Ampersand#039;The Old' invite influential figures to an evening party. Bells ring, doors open, the Old One drags in chairs without end while the Old One receives, until the apartment is packed with visible chairs and invisible guests. With the invisible guests they engage in an animated conversation in anticipation of the speaker who is to lecture on the meaning of existence. The speaker, however, is deaf and dumb.
As in a dream emerging from deep oblivion, the ancients relive moments of a second childhood. But in trying to recall lost happiness, the dream becomes a trauma, swamping them with the nothingness symbolized in empty chairs. The nothingness, however, mirrors the real annihilation in Nazi-occupied Paris. A nothingness that has not lost its relevance today.
The play was written in the spring of 1951 and premiered in Paris in 1952. It is an absurdist play that enables us to philosophize about the meaning and nonsense of our lives and, if we are lucky, to understand that between being and non-being, much and little, nothing and everything, there is only a thin line on which we can perform our tricks like a blind tightrope walker and plunge into the depths of the ring at any time.
Eugene Ionesco was born Eugene Ionesco in Slatina, Romania on November 26, 1909, and died in Paris on March 28, 1994. He was a French-Romanian author. He is considered the most important French playwright of the postwar period and a leading exponent of absurdist theatre.
Text source and further information about this event: http://gallustheater.de/2018/01/stuehle.php
