24 MAY 1957, Page 16

The Mill-Pond

The Chairs, by Eugene Ionesco, and The Apollo de Bellac, by Jean Giraudoux. (Royal Court.) ONE realises perfectly well that it is no use trying to convert people to Ionesco—it is unchangeable love or hate at first sight—but you could not choose a better play than The Chairs with which to make his extraordinary acquaintance for the first time. Two centenarian dodderers live in an old water-mill as deserted and crumbling as them- selves, talking nostalgically, absurdly and end- lessly about the past; their only interest in the present or the future is a meeting which is to be held in the mill at which the accumulated philosophy of the old man's life is to be disclosed to the world in a lecture to be delivered, since he is too old to give it himself, by a professional orator hired for the purpose. The audience begins to arrive and (here the play takes on the authentic Ionesco nightmare quality) the room fills with little golden chairs and a deafening crescendo of ringing doorbells. George Devine and Joan Plow- right, the only two actors on the stage, mime their way with a tottering magnificence from side to side of this imaginary rabble, hailing friends, sell- ing programmes, cursing loudly, and finally on the appearance of the orator throwing themselves happily into the mill-pond in their hour of triumph. The climax, at which the orator, a hideous death's head, unfurls his brief, makes the heart stand still.

There is, of course, something very cruel about Jonesco's plays—in The Chairs it is the pitiful absurdities of old age which are magnified and twisted into his grotesque surrealist shapes-7but at their best they are truly tragic because they put human beings in a place in the universe. It may be repulsive to watch men crawling like

comic blind-worms beneath a dark, gigantic sky, but it can be, and here is, intensely moving.

The Giraudoux piece is a charming satiric fragment over-acted and somewhat under- produced by Tony Richardson, who also directed