Among Eugène Ionesco’s full-length absurdist dramas, The Chairs and Rhinoceros have consistently held the stage; yet the lack of attention paid to Amédée, written in 1954, is puzzling. Perhaps it is due to the elephant in the room – or rather, the giant corpse concealed in a bedchamber that mysteriously continues to expand.
The play is set in a squalid writer’s apartment in what appears to be a militaristic police state. Amédée is an aspiring dramatist who has been finessing the first two lines of his debut drama for the past 15 years. His wife, Madeleine, works as a switchboard operator while skivvying to her husband and the dead body, growing inexplicably, that threatens to take over their apartment.
You can interpret this central metaphor in any number of ways – the bewildering growth of far-right politics, for example – though in Sean Foley’s engagingly off-kilter adaptation it primarily seems to stand for the festering accrual of unresolved issues that overwhelm a failing marriage.
In Roxana Silbert’s surreal production, Trevor Fox’s Amédée is a disjointed, gimlet-faced figure with an ostrich’s instinct for self-preservation; while Josie Lawrence has a comic instinct that enables Madeleine’s expression to crumble from stoic resolution into utter despair in the time it takes her to nibble through a water biscuit.
Yet the biggest credit, in every sense, belongs to puppeteer Craig Denston for the creation of a truly credible five-metre corpse. Amédée is perhaps too disjointed to be considered a masterpiece, but the articulation of the giant’s limbs is a wonder nonetheless.
- At Birmingham Rep until 11 March. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
