Thoughts on a Chair
Originally published at The Off-Center. Please leave any comments there.
This evening, I saw Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Chair by Edward Bond, directed by Robert Wodruff - what an appalling first sentence, but it gets better from here, I promise.
It took me a while to properly digest the play, because I have only ever read pieces of the unfortunately-named “in-yer-face theater”, never had the opportunity to see it live (unless you count Closer.) The play is about a woman, a resident of the London of the future, who brings a chair down to a soldier who has spent hours waiting with his detainee at a bus stop. It is at this point that everything goes spectacularly to pieces.
As I was settling in to watch the show, someone approached the gentleman sitting next to me. “Robert!” he said, and I looked up, and there was Robert Woodruff. I smiled, because I knew it was him, but I said nothing because that would have been inappropriate - tonight was my first time seeing his work.
In any case - without giving too much away - the show left me with this heavy, dissatisfied feeling, not altogether unlike how I feel after I’ve gotten dressed up for the party but don’t end up getting laid as reward for my efforts. Well, that, and this aching feeling in my gut that nothing was ever going to be all right, and everyone who had ever told me so was a dirty damned liar and ought to be very harshly reprimanded. There was some stunning imagery on that stage, and the simple, under-designed set served it well, as did the rich soundscapes used as the only component that denoted the difference between a character’s presence in the apartment and out on the street.
My immediate response to it was to wave my hand and dismiss it as something weird that I didn’t like, but that’s not how I feel about this play. I thought that it was sometimes over-acted and sometimes brilliantly and provacatively acted. I thought it was weird, but in a way that gets the synapses in my brain excited over the people whose stories I am following.
It’s fatal flaw, I think, is that there was no shred of hope at all in the play. No possibility for a change out of the dim, dark future that Bond creates. It is only pain and oppression and the stark reality that eventuall things are going to get so far out of hand that The People In Charge will take it upon themselves to tell us, the mewling masses, what is best. And that will be that, and people will die, and people will suffer, and further will we fall until we destroy ourselves and each other.
And if that’s the message, fine. But frankly, I already feel cynical and depressed most of the time, and I do enjoy to indulge in it through the entertainment I choose, but one little, tiny scrap of hope, one shred of possibility, that would have been enough to keep me from walking home in the freezing rain without my umbrella popped, trudging through the big puddles like some trite cliche.
I think I have decided: I am not interested in utter hopelessness. Give me bleak, dark, grim, downright violent and ruthless, and then throw me a fucking bone. That is what I want.
Here is a very interesting article in Time Out New York from this week’s issue, all on Bond and Woodruff:
Woodruff’s work tends toward sweeping, painterly images and actors working at the edge of their physical capacity, which equips him to match the playwright’s poetic use of violence. Bond specializes in symphonies composed from human ugliness, punctuated with nasty shocks… He uses states of fear to force the audience to think in “accident time,” the sensation that time is moving slowly as the panicked brain speeds up.
All in all, I give Chair a solid B+. Except that now I’m too depressed to do my own work. Thanks a lot, Ed.