Genre
Ionesco described the play as a "tragic farce".[1]
Like Ionesco's earlier play The Bald Soprano (1950), The Chairs belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd, presenting a view of the world as meaningless or without purpose.
Ionesco rejected "realistic" theatre as a trick upon the audience, and instead aimed to make the spectator "participate in an act of imagination which his reason told him was 'absurd'", but which contained all the "nightmarish and contradictory absurdity" of reality.[4]
Philosophical basis
The play addresses the philosophical idea of "the Absurd", referring to the conflict between the human tendency to seek meaning in life and the inability to find it. Ionesco suggests that "life is essentially meaningless, progress an illusion and the totality of our experience nothing but a piece of incomprehensible gobbledegook.".[5]
The one fundamental proposition held in common by Sartre on the one hand, and by Beckett, Genet, Arrabal and Ionesco on the other, is that, at the root of consciousness, and indeed of all Being, there is a Void – un Néant – and that this Void is the point of departure for all lucidity, all experience, all 'personality' and all truth.[6]
Themes
The most fundamental concern in The Chairs is nothingness, or the ontological void. The last moment of the play expresses this, according to Ionesco:
The chairs remain empty because there’s no one there. And at the end, the curtain falls to the accompanying noises of a crowd, while all there is on the stage is empty chairs, curtains fluttering in the wind, etc... and there's nothing. The world doesn't really exist. The subject of the play was nothingness, not failure. It was total absence, chairs without people. The world does not exist because in the future it will stop being, everything dies, you know.[1]
One of the central motifs of the play is the couple. Ionesco explained:
The couple is the world itself, it's man and woman, Adam and Eve, the two halves of humanity who love one another, find one another, who are sick and tired of loving one another; who, in spite of everything, cannot not love one another, who cannot exist except together.[1]
The couple are bound together by 75 years of marriage, but still disagree about simple facts such as whether they had children and whether the Old Man loved his mother. "If we cannot agree about our experience, Ionesco asks, what hope do we have of understanding the world beyond us?" [5]
One thing the couple share is a memory of arriving at a gate into a garden, possibly Paris itself. They have tried to express it every night for 75 years. This "dream of luminosity" may represent Ionesco's idea that "the lucid perception of meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful – the only meaningful - act."[7]
Yet the Old Man and the Old Woman are lonely where they have no right to be: in a social situation. They are trapped, and death is their only escape route.[6]
One of Ionesco's favourite devices is to begin with an empty stage and fill it with proliferating objects. The chairs symbolise the couple's alienation from the world and their escape from the realities of old age and loneliness into a fantasy world of lies, illusions and fabrications. When the Old Woman turns into an usher, Ionesco is pointing out that theatre is also a type of illusion, and hence that "we all live in illusion".[8]
"The Chairs may also be viewed as a self-conscious work, dealing with the situation of the dramatist and the nature of the theatrical experience itself."[1]
Character
In Ionesco's world, the carefully constructed illusion of human logic crumbles in contradiction. "Nothing is left but an endless series of causeless and unrelated phenomena: a world of infinite coincidence".[9] The Old Woman has been told the same story every night for 75 years, but forgets and starts again each evening with a fresh mind.[3]
Dramatically, this amnesia "implies the total disintegration of the classical concept of character".[10] Relationships evolve in strange permutations: the Old Woman is both wife and mother; her husband is both old man and baby. Ionesco's aim is "to create a living version of ‘reality’, sufficiently broad to encompass rational and irrational at the same time".[11]
Language
Like Beckett, Ionesco wrote in French but was not a native French speaker. This slight alienation of thought and language developed into a primary element in his philosophy. "Language itself is an intrinsic manifestation of the absurd."[12]
"For the purpose of demonstrating in dramatic terms the absurdity of language, Ionesco’s favourite weapon is the platitude."[13] To reveal their absurdity, Ionesco's platitudes contradict each other, garble themselves, maintain sound but discard sense. Words seem to promise everything, but the promise in unfulfilled. The inarticulate orator takes this idea to its extreme.[14]
In the play, the Old Man calls the Old Woman Semiramis, the name of a semi-mythical ancient Assyrian queen. This may refer to her association with the Tower of Babel.[15]
Style
"The basic tone of The Chairs is that of bathos. The accelerating rhythm with which the guests arrive creates a sense of expectation that is deflated by the Orator’s muteness and the incomprehensibility of his written message."[1]
The play contains many comic elements. For example, while trying to "imitate February", Ionesco's stage directions indicate that the Old Man "scratches his head like Stan Laurel".[3] However, the play's meaninglessness only becomes meaningful if frivolity is "given a dimension of seriousness and farce one of tragedy".[6]
