This play is absurd, and the actors directors and audience are allowed to wallow happily in all that absurdity, to engage with it, and ultimately enjoy it.
Ionesco’s famous play, both ridiculous and rewarding, creates a unique mélange of the downright bizarre and the overtly intellectual; whether you are there to giggle at two smartly dressed English couples hurling nonsensical statements at one another, or to be presented with Wittgenstein’s ideas about the meaning of words and communication, this is the play for you. You can even do both if you like.
The acting is superb all the way through, Fiona McKenzi being particularly good as the noxiously saccharine Mrs. Smith, and Alex Midha puts on a wonderful display as her husband (both pictured right). The pair is balanced by Tom Coates and Arabella Milbank as the Martins. Typical English couples immersed in a pointedly atypical world, they all four capture the brutal human tendency to rationalize desperately, while, verging on panic, they acknowledge the steady crumble of reality around themselves.
An especial treat is Julia Effertz as the nurse, Mary. She cuts a sinister figure, utterly grotesque in the prim and proper parlour of the Smiths, terrifying the stereotypical English couples for whom she works. Hearing Mrs. Smith querulously tell Mary, a barely restrained force of nature, to ‘pop along now’, captures much of the combination of absurdity and humour in which this play excels.
Undercurrents of hatred and sexual violence run through the play, supporting and emphasizing the main themes. Each character is a slave not only to the social constraints in which they are enmeshed, but also to the raw, primitive needs which those constraints attempt feebly to control. This is brought to the fore most strongly when the elemental figure of Mary is on stage, breaking down the walls between the acceptable and the unacceptable.
The production manages to achieve admirable balance between these two absurdities. Indeed it is a finely balanced play throughout, the cast clearly enjoying the opportunity to dive head first into the rich material Ionesco has supplied, and which ensures a first- rate experience for the audience.
Of course, the audience is still no nearer to finding out just who the bald primadonna is, and exactly why mention of her inspires such shock in the Smiths and the Martins. But that’s all part of the sense of fun, and the threat of fear.
