Do3 - Glass Chair Chair Glass

[french frank]

[Don't ask me!]

Glass Chair Chair Glass

Another of Annie Caulfield's imaginings of real people meeting people they didn't ...

"It's a sunny morning in Paris, 1975, and in the throes of a paranoia laced drunken spree, Tommy Cooper may not be in the best place to enter Eugene Ionesco's world, where events have the logic of a dream, where people don't tell the truth or even know what it is and where mysterious and brutal threats are always close."

[DracoM]

Crikey. How do they get away with it?

[french frank]

Crikey. How do they get away with it?

Well, I still savour memories of Caulfield's Your Only Man where Brian O'Nolan met Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen.

I liked her last one less and can't remember what it was now.

[Still the Same Paul, with Lenny Henry as Paul Robeson]

[mercia]

[Don't ask me!]

............ meaning you don't get the title? ............ an allusion to the way Mr Cooper used to introduce his magic tricks, showing the props to his audience. (plus a reference to Ionesco's Chairs, presumably). (oh dear, it's me being patronising now)

[french frank]

............ meaning you don't get the title? ............ an allusion to the way Mr Cooper used to introduce his magic tricks, showing the props to his audience. (plus a reference to Ionesco's Chairs, presumably). (oh dear, it's me being patronising now)

It makes it worse to suggest you're being patronising . Thank you for the explanation.

[mercia]

spoon jar jar spoon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc3u9bVV6s4

Russ Abbott does a fair impression I believe

[mercia]

How do they get away with it?

how do who get away with what?

[french frank]

spoon jar jar spoon

Got it! TC's glass, EI's chair?

[mercia]

Got it! TC's glass, EI's chair?

[Don't ask me!]

[aeolium]

Not remembering TC's shows that well, I thought it was some kind of bizarre set of introductions like the one in Through the Looking Glass ("Pudding - Alice, Alice - Pudding"), but I suppose the play will reveal all.

[french frank]

Looking at that the comments below the YouTube clip I get the impression that many of the people commenting appreciatively are quite young. There's an idea that the old-style comic has gone out of fashion but I think it's more likely that it's their age rather than their comedy which is against them. Smart young men in their sharp suits are so much more 'now'.

'Glass' because he's supposed to be drunk most of the time in the play, 'chair' because - oh, please yer-self ...

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes, I did see Tommy Cooper at an event in the early seventies. He was dressed in a sharp suit, he had sunglasses on, the fez was absent and he was extraordinarily serious. It really shocked me at the time.

In fact, I had to have a ride on a dromedary to get over it but I didn't like it and it only made things worse. Apparently, he had an alcohol problem so I understand it better now.

[DracoM]

It was still virtually unlistenable to - and I did try.

[french frank]

I suppose it shouldn't be easy to work out what an absurdist play is 'about', so this is perhaps a success from that point of view.

It's obviously designed to do two things, like Your Only Man which gave us Brian O'Nolan's real world alongside his fictional world. The 'real' Tommy Cooper is well documented and the scenes in London between his wife and his agent are straightforward. But what happens when he gets to Paris? I don't immediately see any close connection with Les Chaises specifically, but there is something of the 'tragic farce' in the very unadmirable man and performer of limited talents who feels he can escape to something better.

I found it intermittently slightly funny, the exchanges particularly between the actress and the concierge (hard to tell them apart with their cod French accents), but is the theatre of the absurd supposed to be funny? Apart from some batty moments which I didn't follow (street riots, motorcycles, tape machines?), what was the fundamental absurdity of life that we were being presented with? Was it Cooper's futile dream to rise above his comic nonsense to act in the absurdist drama of the master of the absurd?

A bit hard going: I wonder if it's worth another listen ...

[aeolium]

I found this play a real struggle to get through, but I held out until the merciful end.

To me it was simply flawed in concept. The 'comedy' in Ionesco's plays, at least the ones I have read, seems pretty black and built around dream or surreal situations. This is totally unlike the comedy of Tommy Cooper, which as I remember it is not dark at all and more to do with plays on language and the failure of the stage magician. As I understood the plot of this play, Cooper was not a 'performer of limited talents' but a great and famous comedian admired by Ionesco, though here escaping from a domestic situation in which he had attacked his wife. But the dialogue didn't really work - for one thing, it was almost completely unfunny even though Russ Abbot did a passably convincing imitation of Cooper. Cooper could not understand what Ionesco wanted him to do and though ostensibly a play about the interaction between a comic and an absurdist playwright, it was dominated by the reality of Cooper's drinking and domestic violence.

I don't think Anna Caulfield intended it to come across like this - here is her account of the way the play came about. Obviously she meant it to have a humour that transcended that grim reality, but it didn't work for me.