Chair (play)

Chair is a 2000[1] play by English dramatist Edward Bond. It is the third play in the trilogy The Chair Plays (which also includes Have I None and The Under Room). The play was written specially for radio,[2] and its first staged production was seen at the Avignon Festival in July 2006.

Chair
Written byEdward Bond
Date premiered2000 (2000)
Original languageEnglish
SubjectTotalitarianism

Reception

Reviewing a 2012 performance of Chair at Lyric Hammersmith Studio, Daniel B. Yates of Exeunt argued that the play "begins life in relative stoic tedium before becoming a subtle version of a late Pinter play as it mounts its case to be a harrowing, ugly in its clarity, sternum-crushing affair".[3] Marilyn Stasio praised Bond as adding some highly memorable images to the theatrical repertoire, calling the play "harrowing [...] Let other playwrights shriek about the state of the world. Bond does it in his own, far deadlier fashion."[4] Andy Propst argued that Chair "begins with simple mysteriousness and rapidly accelerates to levels of truly thrilling tautness and disconcerting brutality."[5] The Guardian's Michael Billington said the work "is compulsively watchable – until, that is, the last 10 minutes, when Bond illustrates his arguments with needless explicitness." But Billington praised it as "a strangely hypnotic play that proves a chair is as potent a visual symbol for Bond as it was for Vincent van Gogh."[1]

Other reviewers were less favorable. Sarah Hemming of Financial Times argued, "There is the odd moment of black humour and the piece has a certain bleak poetry. Bond creates some memorable images". However, Hemming said Bond's production "is slow, rather flat and doesn’t draw out the tension and terror in the writing."[6] Charles Isherwood derided the play as both "weightless and ponderous [...] the ideas behind it feel generic, and the situations never quite ring true. The cryptic, often incomprehensible behavior of even the most sympathetic characters keeps us from being either disturbed or engaged."[7]

References
  1. Michael Billington (2012-05-15). "Chair – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  2. "BBC Radio 4 FM - 7 April 2000 - BBC Genome". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  3. Yates, Daniel B. (2012-05-16). "Chair". Exeunt Magazine. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  4. Stasio, Marilyn (2008-12-11). "Chair". Variety. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  5. Propst, Andy (2008-12-11). "Chair | TheaterMania". www.theatermania.com. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  6. Hemming, Sarah (2012-05-15). "Chair, Lyric Hammersmith Studio, London". Financial Times. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  7. Isherwood, Charles (2008-12-12). "Paying a Price for Kindness in a Bitter Dystopia". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
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