Fifty-one years ago, audiences left the first performances of Ionesco's existential "tragic farce" raging with incomprehension. In the intervening period, the notion of life as a brutal, slapstick charade has become commonplace; Ionesco's portrait of a pair of old codgers filling an empty room with chairs for a group of imaginary guests and an invisible emperor, then flinging themselves out of the window, no longer feels radical. Belfast playwright Owen McCafferty has attempted to bring relevance to the play in his new version for Tinderbox Theatre Company by updating and localising it, but this only makes it feel more outdated - particularly in a Northern Irish context, where a reminder that life is illogical and often absurdly violent sadly feels like old news.
Yet there is some beautiful writing here. McCafferty has a wonderfully poetic ear for language, and, as spoken by the fine actors Carol Scanlon and Sean Kearns in full Belfast brogues, the play for the most part sits comfortably in the local idiom: "History gets on my wick," says Kearns. McCafferty uses rhyming particularly well, exploiting the musicality of local speech to ironically point up the emptiness that the couple are trying to fill through their compulsive storytelling: "We roared - not bored - flat on his sword - the lord - cored."
While Simon McBurney's celebrated 1997 staging of this play for Complicite exaggerated the action frenetically, this production, directed by Jimmy Fay, limits the text's ability to grab an audience. Its other innovation is Conor Mitchell's live clarinet and keyboard score. This is probably intended to add another layer of theatricality, but it ends up making the second half of the play feel like a contained set piece rather than a burst of mad, unexplainable energy.
Things don't mount to a very substantial climax. There is a lot of running about, but the final image is that of orderliness: the chairs in their neat rows face upstage as the Orator (Ronan Leahy) does a few low-key party tricks. Some very good acting and lovely writing notwithstanding, this Chairs ends up feeling more dutiful than enlightening.
·Ends tomorrow. Box office: 02890 439313.
