My Chair - Your Self

My Chair - Your Self. That's the name of the theatre I watched. No idea what is the meaning of the title at all? Great, you are at the right track.

Synopsis

It's what we can't see and what everyone else can see. What we fight to control and hide and what others use to exploit. This is a key theme of Identity that forms the basis of the piece "My Chair - Your Self". The piece is really a study of how relationships effect and alter our own identity. How we can reinvent ourselves with someone new, become trapped with someone old, allow ourselves to be manipulated or indeed manipulate ourselves and others by the roles we give ourselves to play. The show explores this fragility through two characters that have become dislocated from the conventional social categories and felt compelled to re-invent themselves. Played-out in the half truth half fantasy worlds they depend on for their existence. With only one real piece of furniture, a chair, they rely on their imaginations to arrange and rearrange the furniture of both their surroundings and their relationship, to discover each others reality and story. In English with some Hungarian.

The theatre started with a girl sitting on the chair and a guy under the chair. While the girl is acting like a mental retarded lady the guy crawl out of the chair and said...

"You are???"

"Are you????"

"Oh...You are!"

"And, I am."

"Am I?"

"Here?"

"You are there...and I am here."

"Am I?"

"It's fantastic."

"You are here, and look, I am just here, and I could see you sitting there."

"You are just sitting there, and I am just sitting here."

During the whole theatre, the English guy (suspected of being afflicted with Dissociative identity disorder) was all the time talking to himself about the chair and himself, while the Hungarian lady (suspected of being afflicted with down sindrome), was all the time talking in Hungarian. In ratio, when the guy was mumbling in 20 sentences, the girl will response in 2 words. And out of a sudden, the girl turns into normal and could speak in English, as if Harry Porter has casted a spell on her, but too bad the spell could last for only 2 minutes.

The theatre did give me some big impact especially some quotes which are still stuck in my mind...

There is always a person standing behind the chair.

I wanted to tell her that 'I love you', but what if she reply, 'Fuck you'?

I went to the hospital to visit my father. He was sitting on his bed and I wanted to stand in front of him and say, 'I love you', but what if he answer, 'Fuck you'?

If you are still puzzling about the meaning of 'My Chair - Your Self', that's fine. Else, you think my 1,200ft of ticket worth nothing?

Anyhow, trust me, even if you buy the ticket, enter the theatre, and watch the whole program from the beginning till the end, it will not help much.

After all, what is theatre for? -To multiply one questions to million more questions, no?

posted by Survon @ 5:54 PM,