This is a Chair (NHB Modern Plays)

Caryl Churchill

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780014340
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

A series of surreal sketches, each prefaced by a doom-laden tabloid style headline, This Is A Chair is at once modern and postmodern, tragedy and farce, about all and about nothing.

'Churchill, who constantly reinvents dramatic form, has come up with something compelling and strange: an intimate revue about the increasing surreality of modern life' - Guardian

'creates a haunting impression of urban alienation, self-obsession and pre-millennial tension' - Daily Telegraph

THIS IS A CHAIR

The War in Bosnia

JULIAN is waiting in a London street holding a bunch of flowers.

MARY arrives.

MARY	I’m so sorry.
JULIAN	That’s all right, don’t worry.
MARY	Have you been here ages?
JULIAN	I got you these.
MARY	They’re beautiful.
JULIAN	I don’t know what you like.
MARY	Thank you very much.
JULIAN	I like orange and blue together, I don’t know if you do, I thought of roses but I think roses are a bit dull, I don’t like pink and red very much as colours, I don’t mind yellow but I thought these.
MARY	Listen, I’m afraid there’s a problem.
JULIAN	Yes.
MARY	I’ve made a stupid mistake.
JULIAN	Never mind.
MARY	No but I’ve made two different arrangements for the same evening, I’ve doublebooked myself, I don’t know how I can be so stupid.
JULIAN	So you have to make a phonecall or . . . ?
MARY	No, it’s really awful, what I have to do is jump in a cab and go whizzing off. Because I have to be there by half past seven.
JULIAN	Something starts at half past seven?
MARY	Yes and I couldn’t reach the other person and anyway the tickets and . . .
JULIAN	Don’t worry.
MARY	It is a concert I particularly . . .
JULIAN	Yes of course. We’d better look for a cab.
MARY	It was the arrangement I made first you see and somehow it slipped my mind and I thought we might have time for a drink anyway but then I was late finishing work and there was a hold-up on the tube it stopped in the tunnel for about five minutes people were starting to get nervous you could see from the way they kept on reading or just staring into space but deliberately because they were getting nervo...