Author Topic: Bond's The Chair  (Read 4765 times)

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Offline Iain Fisher

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Bond's The Chair
« Reply #1 on: July 07, 2010, 03:06:44 PM »
A review of Edward Bond's Chair by Andy Propst, 12 Dec 2008, New York.
 
"Edward Bond's Chair... begins with simple mysteriousness and rapidly accelerates to levels of truly thrilling tautness and disconcerting brutality.

Set in London in the year 2077, Chair centers on Alice (Stephanie Roth Haberle), a nervous middle-aged woman, and Billy (Will Rogers), a mentally and physically challenged young man, who share an apartment. As the play opens, Alice is fixated on what she sees outside the window: a soldier (played with both fierceness and a certain denseness by Alfredo Narciso) and a prisoner (Joan Macintosh) whom he's escorting. Somehow, the prisoner seems familiar to Alice.

... Bond's portrait of a society in which its citizens have been seemingly stripped of all civil liberties, while not necessarily prescient, does have certain present-day parallels... it's almost impossible to keep thoughts of Guantanamo out of one's mind. If this isn't enough to send chills down one's spine, the sort of acute fear that drives all of the characters is.

Robert Woodruff's graceful staging, which embellishes the final moments of Bond's script with terrific ambiguity and leaves theatergoers contemplating several questions about Alice's original interest in the prisoner, starts with a cool nervous simmer and builds intensely..."

The review is here:
www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/news/12-2008/chair_16555.html