‘Now I’ve been sitting on this abandoned beach for years, / Waiting for the salty water to cover up my ears…’

Regina Spektor’s Folding Chair is a song about longing, where the cheerful is flippantly tossed in with the fearful. A big fan of the Spektor song which inspired the play, I was keen to see what Connie Harper would do with this premise. This was, unfortunately, not very much at all.

I can describe the play in a few sentences. An old man, sitting on a folding chair, stares out into the ocean and sleeps frequently. Five other characters float around behind him, occasionally pinning something onto a washing line and blowing each other kisses. There are lots of silences, and lots of blackouts.

The six characters are arranged into couples of different ages: from children, to adults, to the old man on the folding chair and a mysterious old woman who drifts ghostlike across the stage. Apart from one rather sweet relationship between the old man and the young girl, it is not clear what any of these couples have to do with each other. There are simply too many characters, and the stage often looks cluttered. As for the adult couple, played by Tom Stuchfield and Christabel Clark, I can’t help but wonder if Connie Harper put them on stage simply to bridge the generation gap, because – and this not a criticism of the actors themselves but rather of the poor quality of the writing – they are completely superfluous otherwise.

The play seems to be striving for a sort of symbolism which it falls short of. Disconnected scenes like the putting up of snowflakes on the washing line had the potential to be meaningful, but the audience cannot know what make of them. Twenty minutes into the play, and they’re getting impatient. They’re getting exasperated. They’re getting – dare I say it? – bored.

As for the script, it’s not simply that the number of direct quotes taken from the Spektor song was excessive, but that there was very little else. If the play is to be silent, plot-less, script-less, then at least there should be an engrossing visual effect on stage. Unfortunately, there was not. Folding Chair ended at the same place it began, except one hour and countless blackouts later.