The Chairs
Almeida Theatre, London

The Forest
Hampstead Theatre, London

In a happy accident of theatre programming, two French dramas – written 70 years apart but making similar use of absurdism and surrealism – have opened closely together in London.

The Chairs, by the Romanian-French Eugène Ionesco, was first seen in Paris in 1952, a year ahead of the premiere of Waiting for Godot by the Irish-French playwright Samuel Beckett. Each depicting an elderly couple trying to act normally amid escalating abnormality, the plays became foundations of the Theatre of the Absurd, which pursued moral and psychological truth through ludicrous situations.

Unusually referencing the props in its title, The Chairs takes place in a flooded tower, where the characters of Old Man and Old Woman have invited local dignitaries to hear a lecture expressing the husband’s accumulated views on life. Each of these arrivals is represented by one of the titular seats which the couple laboriously drag in and arrange.