Lahr reviews a 1998 revival of lonesco's play in this essay. The critic offers a highly favorable appraisal of the play, labeling it as one of the great dramatic pieces of the twentieth century.

Once, contemplating the survival of his plays, the French-Romanian playwright Eugene lonesco said, "It takes a few decades for a work to become brilliant when it's no longer written by the author, but rewritten by the generations who come after him." Britain's Theatre de Complicite has restaged lonesco's one-act The Chairs nearly half a century after it was written, in 1952, and has established finally and forever the indubitable poetry and genius of the play, which lonesco subtitled "a tragic farce." Here, at the Golden, superbly directed by Simon McBurney and aided by the Quay Brothers' water-stained gray-plank surround of towering doors and cornices, lonesco's ontological void takes the shape of a floating, threadbare island...