The chairs

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The chairs (French original title Les Chaises ) is a one-act play by Eugène Ionesco and the third play by the Franco-Romanian writer, who is considered the most important playwright of the second half of the 20th century and a leading exponent of the theater of the absurd in France . The farce , described by the author as "tragic", was written in the spring of 1951 and premiered on April 22, 1952 under the direction of Sylvain Dhomme in Paris.

At first, however, no theater had been found for a long time that wanted to risk staging this surreal play in play (the stage set consists of an auditorium, the audience looks at itself, as it were) and expects the audience to perform a performance in which most of the characters are silent and stay invisible. Finally, the actors rented an old, unused hall, the Théâtre Lancry. Financially the company was a disaster. All too often the empty chairs on the stage were a true copy of the empty seats in front of the stage. Today the chairs are considered Ionesco's most important work. It is also very popular in the German-speaking area, especially - not least because of its low staffing requirements - with experimental student, cellar and room theaters that have to get by with small ensembles.

content

Poppet and Semiramis, an old couple, he is 95 and she is 94, live in a shabby round tower on an island that is infested with mosquitoes and surrounded by putrid water. To escape the bleak boredom of their present, they indulge in naive memories of their former happiness together. They seem to be the last survivors of a post-apocalyptic world: Paris has been completely destroyed, the Pyrenees no longer exist and all bridges have been broken.

Gradually their childish enthusiasm turns into open reproaches. After Semiramis showered her husband with praise and mothered and caressed him like a son and comforted him with the fact that he was in truth a great philosopher and actually had what it takes to be a boss , the next moment she complains while the tearful old man how a little boy repeatedly screams for his "mom", about whose uselessness he has achieved nothing better in life than the caretaker and "master of cleaning rags and buckets".

The two of them are expecting a professional speaker whom Poppet, himself not particularly talented in rhetoric, has hired to pass on to posterity an important message that he has worked out over the course of his long life about the meaning of existence. They are hectically busy with the invisible dignitaries ( presidents, bankers, owners, scholars, bishops ) and other guests ( police officers, guards, chemists, engravers, violinists, shopkeepers, postmen, innkeepers, artists, officials ) who are gradually arriving from all over the world (MPs, militarists, revolutionaries, psychiatrists and their madmen , but also chromosomes, buildings and penholders ) with exquisite courtesy and to provide enough chairs for them. The rhythm for this is dictated to them by the ringing of the doorbell, which becomes more and more urgent and threatening over time, and the doors that open and close as if by magic, which constantly fly open faster and more demanding and then slam again. The viewer learns more and more about the long marriage history of the two old people, but above all about their isolation and the impossibility of real communication in the endless cycle of life. The hysteria of the two hosts, suffocating in the confusion of chairs and losing sight of each other, grows, and Poppet's confused compliments for the guests, echoing repeated by Semiramis, come thick and fast when the (likewise invisible) emperor arrives personally among the guests.

Finally the speaker himself appears, a man with a petrified face and in historical Biedermeier costume. Entirely enthusiastic, since the quintessence of all their experiences is being spoken out and their life is being transfigured into a legend - happiness that cannot be increased any more - Poppet and Semiramis plunge into the water in a final ecstasy from the tower window and commit suicide.

While at the end of the piece the noise of the audience is faded in over the loudspeaker, the audience in the theater has to realize that the long-awaited speaker is visible, but deaf and mute and instead of intelligible words only produces a hoarse stammer. He writes a few puzzling signs and the word “Adieu” on the blackboard, steps down again and leaves the audience in front of the empty rows of chairs with a view of the open doors that point into black nothingness.

interpretation

Theater poster

The piece has a paradoxical blend of Becket desolation and Marx Brothers -Irrsinn and linked their typical set pieces to the specific climax that is so characteristic of most of the works of Ionesco. Similar to the dramas The Bald Singer (La cantatrice chauve) and The Lesson (La Leçon), the carousel of phrases and anecdotes, compliments and accusations initially picks up speed, but soon becomes faster ( dragging chairs ), screeching ( ringing ) and more confusing ( doors flying open) and finally accelerates to a dizzying pirouette before it suddenly comes to a deadly standstill and throws the protagonists off the screen.

The ritualized marriage of the petty-bourgeois couple represents the idleness of human existence. For 75 years you have looked in vain for a hold in togetherness and yet lost yourself again and again. After a missed life, one now clings to the fictional world of unfulfilled dreams, declaiming senseless phrases and non-sequiturs , and yet at the same time is so presumptuous as to want to make the whole world hear such confusion as the ultimate conclusion of wisdom. The seats, however, remain unoccupied, nobody wants to hear the allegedly happy message that the appointed speaker is supposed to announce and which anyway only consists of incomprehensible gurgles.

This not only shows that a meaningful personal life balance sheet can no longer be drawn or remains banal and does not arrive, it also reveals something about the theater as an educational institution in general - as the speaker's blackboard and the empty chairs document - its message as in the Learning classrooms and being able to carry them home in black and white is expressly denied here. The theater as the “school of the nation” ( Lessing ) as a “moral institution” ( Schiller ) has had its day. Like La Leçon , where Ionesco uses the school as a foil for his story in the title, Les Chaises also demonstrates that educational teaching or even lesson from the stage can no longer be seriously expected. The performers of the absurd theater are (as always) thoroughly frustrated in their search for meaning.

Ionesco is the antipode to the "Lehrstück" writer Bertolt Brecht . The chairs duped “all expectations, there were explanations of the world, certainties of salvation. We now know that the sense that Brecht saw in the story was (utopian) nonsense and the nonsense that Ionesco countered made absurd sense. ”True to his role model, Samuel Beckett , who claimed that his texts revolved in the Circles and therefore do not express anything, precisely because there is nothing more to express in the modern age, Ionesco also sees his mission fulfilled at the moment when he has expressed such expressionlessness. And just like his role model Beckett in Waiting for Godot , Ionesco also quotes in the face of such absurdity at the end of his piece mischievously God as a reminiscence and epitome of the former goal of human search for meaning: "Godot" (English / French "little God") becomes with him the farewell greeting "Adieu" (from French "  á dieu  " (to God)).

When asked for an explanation of his piece, Ionesco writes in a preliminary remark to Die Stühle : “The world sometimes appears to me to be empty of concepts and the real unreal. I wanted to express this feeling of unreality, the search for an essential, forgotten, unnamed reality, outside of which I do not believe I am - by means of my figures, who wander about in the incoherent and who call nothing their own except their fear, their remorse, theirs Failure, the emptiness of their lives. Beings who have thrust out into something devoid of any meaning can only appear grotesque, and their suffering is nothing but tragic ridicule. Since the world remains incomprehensible to me, how could I understand my own piece? I am waiting to be explained to me. "

In a letter to his director Sylvain Dhomme, Ionesco continues to refuse any interpretation, but is a bit more precise: The theme of the play is not the failures and misfortunes of the old people, but the empty chairs themselves, "that is, the absence of people, the absence of the emperor, the absence of God, the absence of matter, the unreality of the world, the metaphysical emptiness; the theme of the piece is nothingness [...] the presence of the invisible must become more and more tangible, more and more real (if one wants to give unreality to the real, then one has to give the unreal reality), until one finally arrives at the point - that of the mind is impermissible, unacceptable - since the unreal begins to speak, almost to move [...] the nothing audible, becomes concrete ” .

In the same letter, Ionesco demands that the sound of the audience recorded at the end is the most important moment in the entire play: At this moment the audience should only be confronted with the empty chairs on an empty stage, which is decorated with paper snakes and littered with useless confetti, which gives the impression of sadness, emptiness and disenchantment, as one would have at the end of a dance event in a ballroom. This would inexplicably bring the chairs, the whole scenery and the emptiness to life (because that is the effect beyond any ratio, truly in its improbability, which one has to strive for and achieve), the logic is overridden and new doubts are born.

When Ionesco was certified that he belonged to the literary avant-garde and had done antitheater, he dismissed this as vague formulations that merely proved that he had created something new. And he wondered whether the avant-garde character of his pieces might consist in their innovative technology: “The renewal might be an attempt to expand the theatrical expression by allowing the stage design and props to play along and requiring the actor to play a simplified, clearer way . Actors could find a style that was both more natural and exaggerated. A game that lies between the game of realistic characters and the game of puppets. Unusual in the natural and of course in the unusual. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sylvain Dhomme was the director who filmed Franz Kafka's novel Das Schloß ten years later .
  2. ↑ See Martin Esslin, 1965, p. 118
  3. ↑ A semiramis is also found significantly in Dante's Divine Comedy , where she is banished to the second circle of hell as a voluptuous woman because she is said to have introduced a law that permitted marriage between mother and son in order to be able to devote herself to her son.
  4. ↑ On the ambivalence of such politeness, cf. Ionesco's comment: “I have the impression that I am in a more or less well arranged world of very polite people. Suddenly something breaks, tears, and the monstrous character of the people comes to the fore, or the stage design becomes something completely unknown, the person and the image thus perhaps reveal their true nature. Theater is maybe that: the revelation of something that was hidden. Theater is the unexpected that shows itself. Theater is a surprise. For me, theater has to be a revelation of hidden truths. Through the theater, they have to emerge as living truths. ” Quoted from: schauburg.net ( memento of the original from 23 September 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schauburg.net
  5. ↑ See on this John Thaxter in: The Stage. Reviews . http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/15036/the-chairs
  6. ↑ See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, "Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel" (1756) and "Hamburgische Dramaturgie", Volume 1, Play 2, May 5, 1767, where he demands that "the theater should be the school of the moral world ".
  7. ↑ See Friedrich Schiller's essay from 1784 “What can a good standing Schaubühne actually do?”, Which later went to print under the title “The Schaubühne viewed as a moral institution”.
  8. ^ Obituary: Eugene Ionesco . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1994, pp. 236 ( online - 4 April 1994 ).
  9. ↑ When asked what art should still express today, Beckett replied: “ The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. ”Quoted from Samuel Beckett, Proust. Three dialogues. Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit . London: Calder & Boyars (1970), p. 103.
  10. ↑ Quoted from Frédéric Towarnicki, 1958.
  11. ↑ See E. Ionesco, Ai-je fait de l'anti-théâtre? ("Have I done anti-theater?"). In: L'Express , June 1, 1961. Quoted from E. Ionesco, Argumente und Gegenargumente , 1962, pp. 240 ff.

literature

Text output

  • Eugène Ionesco, Théâtre I: La Cantatrice chauve, La Leçon, Jacques ou la soumission, Les Chaises, Victimes du devoir, Amédée . Paris: Gallimard (1954).
  • Eugène Ionesco, Plays: The Bald Singer, The Lesson, Jacob or Obedience, The Chairs, Sacrifice of Duty, Amédée or How to Get Rid of Him . Trans. V. Jacqueline and Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert. Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand (1959).
  • Eugène Ionesco, The chairs / The new tenant. Two plays . With an afterword by Marianne Kesting . Stuttgart: Reclam (1959).
  • Eugène Ionesco, The chairs / The new tenant . Trans. V. Jacqueline and Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert. With an afterword by Lore Kornell. Stuttgart: Reclam (2001). ISBN 978-3-15-008656-8

Secondary literature

  • Jean Anouilh : Du Chapitre des Chaises . In: Le Figaro , Paris, April 23, 1956.
  • Frédéric Towarnicki: Des Chaises vides à Broadway . In: Spectacles , No. 2, July 1958.
  • Eugène Ionesco: Arguments and Counter Arguments . Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand (1962).
  • Eugène Ionesco: Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theater . (Trans. By Donald Watson) Grove Press, New York 1964.
  • Martin Esslin : Eugène Ionesco: Theater and Antitheater . In: (Ders. :) The theater of the absurd . (Translated from the English by Marianne Falk). Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1965, ISBN 3-499-55234-5 , pp. 97–158.
  • François Bondy: Eugène Ionesco in self-testimonies and image documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1975, ISBN 3-499-50223-2
  • Wolfgang Hildesheimer : About the theater of the absurd. A speech. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1985. ISBN 3-518-36862-1
  • Walter Jens (ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . Study edition. Kindler, Munich 1988, Volume 8, p. 422.
  • Ute Drechsler: The “absurd farce” at Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco . (Diss.) Tübingen Contributions to English Studies, 12. Narr, Tübingen 1988, ISBN 3-87808-781-0

Web links