Reading Order
The Chairs Reading Order
The Chairs (1952) by Eugène Ionesco is the companion masterpiece to The Bald Soprano and Rhinoceros and Rhinoceros — a play organized around an elderly couple on a remote island who are setting out chairs for an enormous crowd of invisible guests who are coming to hear the Old Man's Message, the sum of his life's wisdom, which will be delivered by an Orator. The chairs accumulate on stage until the stage is full of them and the invisible guests are sitting in them, and the Old Man and Old Woman throw themselves out the window — and the Orator, finally, is revealed to be a deaf-mute who cannot deliver the Message. Ionesco called the play 'a tragic farce,' and the description is exact: the image of the accumulating empty chairs is one of the most haunting in twentieth-century theater, and the play's investigation of the relationship between a life's meaning and its transmission is one of the most devastating. Ionesco said he wrote the play about the terror of nothingness — the gap between the life you have lived and the meaning you hoped it would have.
Where to start
The Chairs (1952) — the complete text. Best Ionesco reading order: The Bald Soprano → The Lesson → The Chairs → Rhinoceros → Exit the King.
Complete The Chairs Book List
- 1Buy
The Chairs
Eugène Ionesco·1952·The complete play — the Old Man, the Old Woman, the accumulating chairs, and the Orator. One of the defining plays of the Theatre of the Absurd; the first production was directed by Sylvain Dhomme at the Théâtre du Nouveau Lancry in Paris in 1952 with a small audience - 2Buy
The Bald Soprano
Eugène Ionesco·1950·Ionesco's companion — the Mr. and Mrs. Smith household and the collapse of language into meaninglessness. The companion in Ionesco's earliest absurdist mode: where The Bald Soprano investigates the emptiness of bourgeois conversation, The Chairs investigates the emptiness of the meaning we hope a life will add up to - 3Buy
Rhinoceros
Eugène Ionesco·1959·The companion organized around the townspeople turning into rhinoceroses. The companion investigation of the same absurdist mechanism but with a more explicit political dimension: in The Chairs, the terror is existential (the empty chairs, the undeliverable Message); in Rhinoceros, the terror is social (conformity, totalitarianism, the loss of individual identity) - 4Buy
Exit the King
Eugène Ionesco·1962·The companion organized around King Bérenger dying during the course of the play. The companion investigation of the same subject that organizes The Chairs: the relationship between a life and its ending, the impossibility of dying well, the terror that the life you have lived will turn out to mean nothing - 5Buy
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett·1953·The companion in the Theatre of the Absurd tradition — Didi and Gogo waiting. The companion investigation of the relationship between the accumulation of time (the chairs; the evenings of waiting) and the meaning that accumulation fails to produce - 6Buy
Endgame
Samuel Beckett·1957·Beckett's companion at the end of the world — Hamm and Clov and the ashcans. The companion investigation of the relationship between ending and meaning: like The Chairs, Endgame is organized around figures who have accumulated a life and who cannot now make sense of what it was for - 7Buy
Being and Nothingness
Jean-Paul Sartre·1943·Sartre's companion philosophical investigation of the relationship between existence and meaning. The companion philosophical text to The Chairs as an investigation of what it means to be human in a world without inherent meaning: Ionesco's empty chairs dramatize what Sartre argues: that existence precedes essence, and that we must create our own meaning or face the abyss - 8Buy
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus·1942·Camus's companion essay on the absurd — the relationship between human longing for meaning and the universe's silence. The companion philosophical text to The Chairs as an investigation of what to do with the discovery that the meaning we hoped to transmit cannot be transmitted: Camus's answer is to imagine Sisyphus happy; Ionesco's Old Man and Old Woman throw themselves out the window
The Chairs — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Chairs by Ionesco about?
The Chairs is about an elderly couple on a remote island who are setting out chairs for invisible guests coming to hear the Old Man deliver his life's Message — the wisdom he has accumulated and the meaning his life has had. The chairs accumulate until the stage is full of them; the Old Man and Old Woman address the invisible guests with increasing excitement; and then they throw themselves out the window so that the Orator can deliver the Message on their behalf — and the Orator, when he finally speaks, is revealed to be a deaf-mute who can only produce unintelligible sounds and write incoherent words on a blackboard. The play is about the gap between the meaning we believe our lives to have and the possibility of transmitting that meaning.
What is the Theatre of the Absurd?
The Theatre of the Absurd is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin in 1961 to describe a group of plays from the 1950s and early 1960s — by Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others — that shared certain characteristics: the rejection of realistic plot and psychology, the use of cyclical or non-progressive structures, the investigation of the gap between human longing for meaning and the absence of inherent meaning in the universe, and the use of comic form to investigate tragic subjects. The theatre of the absurd grew out of the philosophical climate of postwar Europe (existentialism, the aftermath of the Holocaust) and the theatrical climate (Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, the influence of Chaplin and the commedia dell'arte on Beckett). Ionesco was one of its founders; The Bald Soprano (1950) is usually taken as its inaugural text.
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