Ionesco’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre

 

David Begelman

 

Judging from the Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s masterful 1962 drama, Le Roi se meurt, the burdens of royalty extend to many things. In their sumptuous production, director Armfield has three characters, a king and his past and present queens, traipse across the stage in cumbersome, overly long robes they have to manage with royal aplomb, if only to move from one spot to another. Their sweeps of ermine-laced garments accentuate highly placed positions in a realm that is, alas, on its last wobbly legs. Even the sun doesn’t shine as brightly as it once did in the kingdom, while the royal palace is a ramshackle shadow of its former glory.

The 400 year-old King Berenger’s world is closer to collapse than he ever imagined. His death looms but 90 minutes away—the length of the show, as his Queen Marguerite wryly observes—although he resists its clammy proximity tooth and nail, preferring instead to “rage against the dying of the light.”

It is something of a mystery why Ionesco’s Exit the King is not performed on American stages more often. It is certainly one of his most impressive works. Perhaps its mordant note about an end to dreams of empire resonates with our current political situation; maybe the centennial year of the playwright’s birth had something to do with mounting the current production—who knows? Whatever the reason, theatergoers who miss this show will sacrifice an opportunity to experience something special: an impressive staging of a play by the author of The Rhinocerous and The Bald Soprano.

Ionesco has been described as an “absurdist” dramatist along with others, like Samuel Beckett. Yet the term refers to bodies of work of quite different scope. Beckett’s world is one in which language and experience are disconnected against the backdrop of an elusive reality, whereas Ionesco strikes a more Gnostic note: the rejection of the tangible world altogether. Reportedly, this theme had its origin earlier in the playwright’s life when, under a summer sun, he experienced a “luminosity” and sense of well being before a sudden world of empty meaning dawned upon him. Exit the King resonates with the same theme, although one revolving around the efforts of a monarch to stay alive in a world that no longer matters.

The production of Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre is a polished one, with six accomplished actors turning in fine, although markedly different characterizations. A bravura performance by the Australian actor, Geoffrey Rush, as King Berenger, is the highlight of the show, and one that in all likelihood will be talked about for years to come.

This is Mr. Rush’s Broadway debut, and moviegoers are familiar with his portrayals in such films as Shine, Shakespeare in Love, Quills, The Tailor of Panama, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Less known is his training under Jacques LeCoq, an innovator in “physical theatre.”  The stint was no doubt instrumental in contributing to the actor’s gift for mime and stage movement. There are several moments in the production at which his accomplished vaudevillian, faux-balletic prancing and jigs drew peals of laughter from the audience. Yet the power of his performance lay in the way he combined the comic and tragic aspects of his role.

Other performers contributed solidly to the success of the production. Susan Sarandon (who had major roles in such films as Bernard and Doris, Thelma and Louise, The Witches of Eastwick, and won an 1995 Oscar for her role in Dead Man Walking) plays Queen Marguerite. The character at first strikes an ongoing cynical note at the pretensions of the king; yet she is the one whose final act of devotion is to guide the anguished monarch into accepting his demise.

The interaction between king and queen at the end of the play, while drawn out, may have been scripted purposely this way by Ionesco, as though he were delineating the end of a life as a slowly diminishing musical note.

Andrea Martin, a seasoned Broadway trouper, plays Juliette, a palace maid who scurries about the business of useless tasks for the king like a harassed gopher, grumbling all the way. Hers was a hugely funny and accomplished portrayal.

Lauren Ambrose is a younger Queen Marie, a royal figure of devotion to King Berenger, whose nerves were continually frayed by his dramatic posturings, while William Sadler as The Doctor brought this character’s obscure wisdom to bear on the king’s existential plight. Part physician, part alchemist, part magician and astrologer, he is every fairy-tale’s version of the court advisor whose head is crammed with the impenetrable stuff of non-existent truth.

Brian Hutchison as The Guard cuts a convincing picture of the palace sentry. Armored and robotic in both his movement and his responses to events going on around him, he is the quintessential yes-man for King Berenger. The Guard is perhaps Ionesco’s playful commentary on military culture, and one that would in all likelihood not sit well with an audience of American Legion veterans.

Humor was no stranger to Ionesco, nor to the current adaptors of his play. In his 1955 drama Jack, or The Submission, the playwright’s version of a son’s rebellion against his parents takes an extravagant turn. Impossibly, they insist he marry a girl with two noses. Quite naturally, he protests—but only because he wishes to marry one with three. In the current production of Exit the King, there is an enormous clap of thunder in a section of the play, whereupon all characters are suddenly seen scurrying about under a strobe light. When the disturbing event ceases, King Berenger exclaims: “What the f__ was that?” This sets the audience to howling, but obviously not at anything Ionesco had a hand in writing. 

Dale Ferguson’s forlorn set was well appointed for the play, and reminiscent of the surreal paintings of Eugene Berman, while Damien Cooper’s lighting enveloped the ongoing action wonderfully.

At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, there was no advance notice in the playbill of the use of strobe lighting to alert audience members who had seizure disorders. Ordinarily, the requirement to avoid such a mishap is a slower flash rate. Unlike some Ionesco dialogue, not funny.

Exit the King opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47^th Street, NYC, on March 26, 2009, and closes on June 14, 2009. Performances are: Tuesday at 7 PM; Wednesday – Saturday at 8 PM; Wednesday and Saturday at 2 PM; and Sunday at 3 PM. Tickets range from $66.50 to $250.50, Students: $26.50. Tickets may be purchased online www.playbill.com  or at the box office, 212-239-6200.

 

This review was published in the Citizen News of New Fairfield, Connecticut, May 13, 2009