An Audience of Chairs is a 2019 drama about a mother living with mental illness who struggles to cope.
Maura Mackenzie (Carolina Bartczak) plays the piano. Not just for the love of music. Not just for concerts or shows. She plays it as escape, or as it becomes clear, from a gripping madness. It’s part of a mental affliction that is at first not so obvious, but slowly consumes her, leaving her ever more slipping away from the world around her. Raising two young daughters, this is a problem, especially when her distraction puts them in danger. This drives her husband Duncan (Christopher Jacot) to make a tough choice and take custody of them, though he is not entirely sympathetic to his wife’s descent, often absent from her life with his own agenda.
Music has long been a catalyst for stories of agonizing breakdowns where those with such talents face challenges of great extremes, usually from instructors and mentors. With director Deanne Foley‘s latest An Audience of Chairs, a haunting adaptation of Joan Clark‘s 2005 novel of the same name, it is less about a passion for excellence than the fracture of reality obsession may lead too, not helped by a disorder carried on from mother to daughter. This leaves Maura in a sort of open isolation where the piano is her singular instrument for keeping sanity even as it – for all orbiting her – is the source of her continued collapse.
What’s most heartbreaking in all this is how cognizant Maura is of her condition, where it comes from, and how it is ruining her, deflecting responsibility where she can, even when she nearly sets the house on fire. Yet she makes worse decisions and in the aftermath is forced to run face first into the walls that are closing in around her. That leaves An Audience of Chairs a small but tragic film, focused on a family that has been here before, trying to do what they can, including her father (Peter MacNeill), who understands his daughter’s journey all too well.
This isn’t a musical prodigy story despite Maura’s incredible skills. It’s rather a fight for survival, where the slow climb to stability is never easy, made so both literally and metaphorically (a moment on a steep hillside makes that clear). It’s truly moving to watch Maura tackle what has clearly enveloped her, believing she is healing even as we see it corrode her already frail edges. Bartczak sinks painfully into the part, never letting it become melodramatic but instead loading Maura with a deeply centered ache that holds all of this together, even as it’s meant to lay her out in tatters.
Foley wisely gives us a glimpse of Maura as a success in the opening moments, revealing an entirely different sort of woman (and time) that is purposefully brief and devoid of exposition, a wispy flavorful scent of the other side that lingers over the rest of the story that makes everything we see follow all the more damaging. It reminds us that the struggle Maura endures is not momentary, that choices can last a lifetime and there are some shadows we can never outrun. An Audience of Chairs is an uncommon exploration of mental health that avoids many of the usual trappings with intelligent dialogue and unobtrusive direction. It’s quiet and reflective, decidedly poignant yet most especially, honest.