Wiener Festwochen 2011: Les Chaises – The Chairs

Wiener Festwochen 2011

Les Chaises - The Chairs
Play / Lausanne / Austrian Première

Date:  Jun 6 to 9, 19:30
Venue: Halle E
In French, overtitled in German

Sunset is the hour of the jukebox, of boisterous evening entertainment. Ever since messages became news and news became infotainment, the deaf-muteness of anchors and professional speakers is no longer noticeable at all. Pointlessness is programmatic and vacuity the very fabric of show business. This is how Luc Bondy\'s production of this masterpiece of surreal-absurd theatre, Ionesco\'s The Chairs (1951), ends: no longer mired in ossified bourgeoisie but in the poetry of a ramshackle music hall, where a melancholy ersatz Johnny Cash seems to have got stuck in an endless microphone test loop. The two protagonists treat the text as a sort of dry-run of their own mortality: a conscious ritual of dying, in love with life, intimate in togetherness. The ancient couple planning to receive a large number of (invisible) guests - for whom they carry dozens of (visible) chairs on stage - to bear witness to a final self-assessment of their everyday lives in the presence of a specially hired keynote speaker who is to utter final, conclusive truths: this couple is played by two young actors who in remembrance of happy moments tend to abandon their feigned infirmity, transmuting into acrobats and anarchists, agents of survival in an underbelly of shallow puddles and pools that will ultimately receive their dead bodies.

Cast
Text: Eugène Ionesco / Director: Luc Bondy
Production: Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne
Co-production: Wiener Festwochen, Equinoxe, scène nationale de Châteauroux

www.festwochen.at