- Exit The King by Eugene Ionesco, review by Michael Scott Moore in SF Weekly July 8, 1998
- . . . As the finale of the Exit’s Absurdist Season, it
has not just an apt name but also a vividly absurd set -- the
huge colorful throne could be an upholstered lifeguard tower,
flanked by mushroom-stools out of Alice in Wonderland. The
royal guard wears bicycle-safety gear, a red codpiece, and a
breastplate mounted with a barbecue grill. Juliet the
chambermaid clanks around the stage with towels and kitchen
utensils tied around her waist, and the king wears duck
slippers, a plastic cape, and fools’ motley on his legs. All this
threatens good things for the play, but the colors blare with
false promise. They show the king’s country as a candied place
where people in ridiculous disguises connive and flatter and lie;
and any hopes for the show, at least at first, are just as false. . . . - http://www.sffringe.org/media/king.html
Berenger, the King (Geoffrey Rush) is a parodic portrayal of the ultimate patriarch. He has seen better days: his demesne once extended over 9000 million people, but now he rules over less than a thousand prematurely-aged subjects, and what is left of his kingdom keeps falling into an abyss. His court is reduced to a shabby retinue: there's the domestic help Juliette (Julie Forsythe), who also fulfils the functions of nurse, cook and general dogsbody, the Guard (David Woods) and the Doctor (Billie Brown), who is also the astrologist and executioner, and his two rival queens, Marie (Rebecca Massey) and Margeurite (Gillian Jones).
As we are informed, the King must die by the end of the play. The play itself is simply a matter of getting there, as Berenger howls against his fate, moving from denial to terror to pathos to a final, moving acceptance. Ionesco has literalised the tyranny of the ego, which at the point of death refuses to contemplate its own annihilation, and will give anything - even the destruction of the entire world - if only it can go on living. But even the King, who once, we are given to believe, could command the sun itself, has to bow before death. . . . .
http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2007/03/review-exit-king.html
