'An absolutely superb production,' Missy Lorelei is completely won over by Ionesco's classic.
Eugene Ionesco’s post-war play has an enigmatic troubling quality at its core that is its very strength-something otherworldly and unsettling. Old Man and Old Woman (John Carty and Sandra O’Malley, both wonderful) sit in their sparse, ramshackle house, as grey and dusty as they are, talking in an elliptical manner, finishing each other’s sentences yet saying approximately nothing- a wry comment by Ionesco on the uselessness of communication in a long marriage. Words are spent: they know each other too well-or not well enough.
Then the visitors arrive- invisible visitors, supposed dignitaries (to whom Old Man will lay out his proposed intellectual visions) with whom they have half-conversations, culminating in Old Woman’s bawdy flirtation with one. Do they symbolise ghosts, real figures or shells of the couples’ own unfulfilled aspirations and dreams? Who can say.
An entirely subjective response is key here, and as Old Woman rushes to collect the increasingly numerous chairs for the guests to sit on with almost clockwork, vaudevillian precision, while eleven doors open and slam shut and doorbells chime to the point of cacophony (“ask not for whom the bell tolls”, as Donne said), the atmosphere becomes charged with unspoken threat and hilarious absurdism, and that is the real marriage here- one of tremendous inconvenience. An absolutely superb production.
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