I turned up a few minutes early for Furniture Boys and, with no one there, picked my seat in the middle of the vacant rows.
A few guttural, toothpaste-ejecting sounds emerged from the stage where a figure in a red jumpsuit was walking around assessing various items of furniture, including a settee, wooden chairs and a wooden shelf.
“My kinda show,” I thought; “a bit of a kooky comedy, so maybe it’s a bit early in the festival for audiences to build up; should be nice and personal, though hopefully a few more people will appear before it starts.” Ten minutes later, virtually every seat was filled as the audience, who must have been in the bar, was ushered in.
Every seat. One rarely pays too much attention to simple items of furniture, but Emily Weitzman, a writing professor at Columbia University in New York, spent five years developing the fabulously zany, yet insightful, plot in which she converts boyfriends into lamps, futons, couches and, come break-ups, into broken chairs.
So Liam becomes a lampshade she’s holding. “He was always lampsplaining everything, but after a while I realised he wasn’t too bright,” she muses with dripping irony.
Then there’s Leonardo, who features as a frustratingly stuck drawer which, after a bout of vicious shaking, she opens, only to reveal another jammed drawer; and Kyle, who is represented by lots of tiny bits of furniture on a shelf. “Cute, but childish,” Weitzman, 33, opines. She also dons a pair of glove puppets and foot gloves as she writhes around with an ex on her sofa.
It’s ingenious and delightfully idiosyncratic and is matched by a sensual and at times cleverly clownish performance from the sassy Weitzman.
Artfully directed by Kate Doyle and Jacob Combs, it switches from flashing lights when the couch is speaking to pink, romantic lighting when Weitzman is on a date with the chair. And there’s several snippets of “La Vie en Rose” by Edith Piaf when affairs with an item of furniture heat up.
The play also embraces a whimsically ironic documentary element as Weitzman looks back at her earnest 18-year-old self performing in a red dress on a big screen at the back of the stage and deliberately amateur video shots of an argument with an ex over the coveted broken white chair.
Beyond the enchanting absurdism, it develops into a philosophical and highly literate meditation on relationships, impermanence and, well, life itself. Well worth sitting through.
- Furniture Boys
- Underbelly (Jersey), Bristo Square
- Until August 30 (not Aug 18 or 25)
