A chair-free scene in the National's Saint Joan. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
What is it with actors waving chairs? A recent production of The Children's Hour at Manchester's Royal Exchange had everything going for it. A grown-up, gut-punching play by Lillian Hellman, first seen on Broadway in the 1930s. A starring role for the bright and talented Maxine Peake. A revelatory discovery in Kate O'Flynn, who plays a schoolgirl schemer with such grandeur and malevolence that she later received a standing ovation just walking through the bar. With all these riches on display, it was difficult to see why we needed the chair-waving. It happened between acts, in the set changes that usually take place in the dark. Here, the set changes were turned into theatre business - bad, bad business - with clumsy balletic moves and a wooden chair per person.
The same thing happened last summer, in the superb production of Saint Joan at the National Theatre. Joan was played by Anne-Marie Duff who, like Maxine Peake, leaped into our affections via her performances in Shameless. Duff's performance was both heartrending and ferocious, conveying exactly why the soldiers might follow Joan, though they surely felt she was mad. There was nothing this play needed that it did not have: a great script, fine actors and many outstanding performances. Yet director Marianne Elliott seemed to feel this was not enough.
George Bernard Shaw is a genius, but his script left room for a vast choreographed tableau of furniture-waving and Elliot made sure the production got it. The play began with a great tower of chairs that was dismantled painfully slowly. In the battle scenes, the chair-waving was augmented with radiator-slapping and dustbin-lid-wielding, like an am-dram version of Stomp! At the end, the tower of chairs was rebuilt for Joan's pyre.
Ask anyone who has seen either of these productions what they remember. They can only talk about the chair-waving. They want to talk about something else, but like Michael Corleone trying to leave the Mafia, they keep getting dragged back to all the bad business.
Perhaps the chair stuff is a hangover from the first year at drama school, when everyone was pretending to be a tree or jellyfish and flirting with mime and modern dance. Or perhaps it is the influence of TV's celebrity talent shows: yes, Anne-Marie Duff is a brilliant actress, but let's see how well she can tap out a rhythm with a spanner on a sheet of tin.
Or maybe there is another explanation. Sarah Frankcom, the director at Manchester's Royal Exchange, took over from Marianne Elliott. Could all this chair-waving be a modern Manchester tradition? If it is, let's just stop it now. I am from Manchester and I have never waved a chair. Though I have thrown a few.
