The yellow benches. Urban squares as theater stages

The focus of this essay is a yellow painted bench placed at the square St Johannesplan in the city of Malmö, Sweden. It is a so called friendship bench, part of a campaign for preventing mental illness. In the essay, the friendship bench is discussed in relation to furniture history and Goffmans’ idea of frontstage and backstage. The point is advanced that the friendship bench can be understood as an arrangement of a simultaneous frontstage and backstage, and a parallell is drawn to the role of the ago-ra of ancient Greece. It is concluded that friendship bench differs from most other furniture in that it stages a concern rather than humans.