When a hand grenade suddenly lands in their apartment, it’s just one more thing for the couple to bicker about in “Delirium,” director  Igor Golyak’s explosive adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 absurdist play “Frenzy for Two, or More.”    The Arlekin Players’ production at the Space at Irondale showcases the inexhaustible calisthenic clowning by Chulpan Khamatova and Andrey Burkovskiy, both celebrated Russian actors now in exile. At the same time, a play that is so devoted to nonsense in dialogue and action more or less forces the audience to look for the allegory that gives it purpose. I found two – one timely, one timeless; one bleak, the other hopeful.

That grenade is just one example of the apocalypse that ‘s occurring in the world right outside their apartment, which  intrudes in persistent paroxysms of destruction – falling debris, flashing alarms, collapsing walls, explosions; the stagecraft is a master class by the set, prop, lighting and sound designers, which might have held much the same delight as the self-destructing set in “The Play That Goes Wrong” if it were not so edged in dread.  

Ionesco wrote the play in the midst of global conflicts and the Cold War, with the looming fear of nuclear annihilation. It is an insight of the director, who was born in Kyiv, to see the parallels between then and now, in the proliferation and severity of current global conflicts (“There are now more active state-based conflicts than at any point since the end of the Second World War,” according to the Global Peace Index 2026), and anxiety about the future.  Meanwhile, just as Ionesco’s couple, trapped in an apartment surrounded by encroaching violence, devote their energy to trivial arguments – chief among them, whether a snail and a tortoise are the same animal – so it is that many of us now engage in fracases on social media.

But “Delirium” can be read as an allegory not just about the state of the world, but about the state of relationships.

The couple is consumed by mutual grievance, insult, accusation.

“From the first day I knew we’d never understand each other”

“You said we have to resign ourselves to suffocation”
“When did I say that? I never said that.”

If they agree on anything, it’s their shared regret that she left her husband 17 years ago for him.

But every now and then they share a moment…of physical passion, even of loveliness (aka love) At one point, she dances around the white parasol he is carrying while the stage is bathed in pink polka-dot lighting.  Another time, it’s bubbles.

These are the moments that made it worth sitting through a production whose chaos, for all its inventive variation, requires some patience. The performers demonstrated an endurance far more impressive than my own;  As they smothered each other with heavy mattresses, jumped on top of one another, rushed up and down stairs, it started to hurt my back just to watch them.

Golyak and his Boston-based Arlekin Players have demonstrated a level of theatrical imagination and social conscience – in such works as “Our Class,” “Witness,” and their various experimental versions of The Cherry Orchard – to make me eager to see anything they do, no matter the obstacles.

Delirium
The Space at Irondale through November 7
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $79 – $149
Written by Eugene Ionesco
Adapted and directed by Igor Golyak
Cast: Chulpan Khamatova and Andrey Burkovskiy
Scenic and props design by Jan Pappelbaum and Cecilia Xuetong Feng, costume design by Sasha Ageeva, lighting design by Jeff Adelberg,  sound design by Denis Zabiyaka, composer Anna Drubich, hair and makeup by Anna Furman