The Chairs: A Neapolitan Adaptation of Ionesco's Masterpiece

From April 5 to 7, 2024, at the TRAM, "The Chairs" is staged, loosely inspired by the homonymous text by Eugène Ionesco, adaptation and direction by Antonio Iavazzo and Gianni Arciprete, starring Gianni Arciprete and Licia Iovine. The show, produced by the "Il Colibrì" association of Sant'Arpino, brings to the stage, just over 70 years after its debut, one of the twentieth century's masterpieces by the Romanian-born French playwright and essayist. The two protagonists, an elderly married couple - here revisited in a "courteously Neapolitan" key, frantically prepare chairs for a series of invisible guests who, later, will listen to a much-awaited speaker who will, probably, reveal a message about the meaning of life. The invited guests seem to be, ideally, all the people in the world: their invisibility suggests a post-apocalyptic scenario, in which the guests engage in dialogues and cryptically reminisce about their lives. 'An immersion among genuinely human madness,' the director Antonio Iavazzo defines it. Ionesco's work, defined by the author himself as a tragic farce, revolves around chaos over which a will for paradise reigns and a deafening desire for a smile that can somehow justify and satisfy the sense of emptiness and alienation. On the other hand, how else to define life and relationships among men if not as an experience of profound disorientation and metaphysical mockery? The two protagonists, in their poignant isolation, like two clowns thrown into the phenomenal world, move suspended and busy. Among waits and imaginary arrivals, sweet memories, and blatant lies, evocations, absurdities, and paradoxes, they prepare a phantom message for humanity to be entrusted to a speaker who will never arrive. Even, and perhaps especially, in the long farewell of the couple who leaves the world entrusting themselves, without any despair or fear, to the sea and its secrets.