Le Roi se meurt
Encyclopedia
Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
by Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
that premiered in 1962.
The play
It is the third in Ionesco's "Berenger Cycle", the first two being The KillerTueur sans gages
The Killer is a play written by Eugene Ionesco in 1958. It is the first of Ionesco's Bérenger plays. The others are Rhinocéros , Exit the King , and A Stroll in the Air...
(1958) and Rhinocéros
Rhinoceros (play)
Rhinoceros is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. The play belongs to the school of drama known as the Theatre of the Absurd...
(1959), and the final one being A Stroll in the Air (1963). In the other plays of the "Berenger Cycle", Berenger appears as a depressed and insecure everyman who is prone to sentimentality. In Exit the King, he is the solipsistic
Solipsism
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from Latin solus and ipse . Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not...
and belligerent King Berenger the First who was apparently at one point able to command nature and force others to obey his will. Also, the king is, according to his first wife, over four hundred years old. He is informed early in the play that he is dying, and the kingdom is likewise crumbling around him. He has lost the power to control his surroundings and is slowly losing his physical capabilities as well. Through much of the play, he is in denial of his death and refuses to give up power. Berenger’s first wife, Marguerite, along with the Doctor, try to make Berenger face the reality of his impending death. Berenger’s second wife, Marie, sympathetically attempts to keep Berenger from the pain of knowing his death is imminent. The king lapses into Berenger’s normal sentimentality, and eventually accepts that he is going to die. The characters disappear one by one, leaving the king, now speechless, alone with Marguerite who prepares him for the end. Marguerite and then the king disappear into darkness as the play ends.
Exit the King is unusual among Ionesco’s works in that the plot is linear and focuses on depletion rather than accumulation. Commonly in Ionesco plays, the stage is filled with more and more objects or characters; in Rhinoceros, for example, the stage is filled with more and more rhinoceroses. In this play, however, the kingdom and all the characters slowly disappear. Likewise, the language is generally more straight forward and comprehensible, eschewing Ionesco’s tendency toward abundant clichés and nonsense. Ionesco told Claude Bonnefoy in a 1966 interview that Exit the King did not “originate in a dream” as many of his plays did but was “much more consciously composed. People immediately said: ‘Oh! He’s given up the avant-garde, he’s turning classical!’ It wasn’t a question of choosing between classicism and the avant-garde. I had quite simply written in a different style because I was on a different level of consciousness”.
Ionesco also said the play was composed while he was ill and frightened of death. He was inspired partly by a childhood obsession with death in which Ionesco believed one could simply avoid being sick and live forever. Exit the King was written to be a kind of lesson in death: “I told myself that one could learn to die, that I could learn to die, that one can also help other people to die. This seems to me to be the most important thing we can do, since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die. This play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying”.
Les Essif in Empty Figure on an Empty Stage points out that Exit the King comes closest of all Ionesco’s plays to the paradigm of absurdism established by Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. Though Beckett and Ionesco are commonly grouped together under the name “Theatre of the Absurd” for their shared themes of alienation and the difficulty of communication, Beckett’s plays generally present a stripped down, minimalist tableau where Ionesco present a proliferation of chaos. According to Essif, Exit the King is Ionesco’s most Beckettian play: “The image of an exterior world fades in cadence with the protagonist’s surrender to the interiority of his consciousness, that is, with the increasing intensification of his inward-turning. The vertical axis of the subjective abyss runs counter to the horizontality of the external world”.
Productions
The play was filmed for television in 1978 in a production directed by Yves-André Hubert and again in 2006. A production of Exit the King was mounted by Company BCompany B
Company B may refer to:*Company B - a dance-pop trio.**Company B , Company B's 1987 debut album.*Company B - a theatre company.Company B - A marketing and Public Relations firm in Milwaukee, WI...
(Sydney) in 2007 directed by Neil Armfield
Neil Armfield
Neil Geoffrey Armfield AO is an Australian director of theatre, film and opera.Born in Sydney, Armfield was the youngest of three boys. The son of a factory worker at the nearby Arnott's biscuit factory he was brought up in the suburb of Concord adjacent to Exile Bay...
, starring Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Roy Rush is an Australian actor and film producer. He is one of the few people who has won the "Triple Crown of Acting": an Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. He has won one Academy Award for acting , three British Academy Film Awards , two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen...
as King Berenger. The production also formed part of the 2007 Malthouse Theatre season in Melbourne and was one of the plays in the VCE
Victorian Certificate of Education
The Victorian Certificate of Education or VCE is the credential awarded to secondary school students who successfully complete high school level studies in the state of Victoria, Australia. Study for the VCE is usually completed over two years, but it can be spread over a longer period in some cases...
curriculum drama students could choose to analyse.
The play opened on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
in a limited engagement at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
The Ethel Barrymore Theatre is a legitimate Broadway theatre located at 243 West 47th Street in midtown-Manhattan, named for actress Ethel Barrymore....
, with previews starting March 7, 2009, opening March 26, and closing June 14. Directed by Armfield, the cast stars Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Roy Rush is an Australian actor and film producer. He is one of the few people who has won the "Triple Crown of Acting": an Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. He has won one Academy Award for acting , three British Academy Film Awards , two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen...
(who won a Tony Award for his performance), Susan Sarandon
Susan Sarandon
Susan Sarandon is an American actress. She has worked in films and television since 1969, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She had also been nominated for the award for four films before that and has received other recognition for her...
, William Sadler
William Sadler (actor)
William Thomas Sadler is an American actor who works in film and television. His television and motion picture roles have included Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller in The Pacific, Luther Sloan in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sheriff Jim Valenti in Roswell, convict Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption,...
, Andrea Martin
Andrea Martin
Andrea Louise Martin is an American and Canadian actress and comedienne. She has appeared in films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding, on stage in productions such as My Favorite Year, Fiddler on the Roof and Candide, and in the television series, SCTV.-Personal life:Martin, the oldest of three...
, Lauren Ambrose and Brian Hutchison
Brian Hutchison
Brian Hutchison is an American actor based in New York City. Most of his professional career has been spent in the theater, but he has also appeared in several major movies and US television series....
. It had previously been produced on Broadway by the APA-Phoenix Repertory Company at the Lyceum Theatre from January 9, 1968 to June 22, 1968. The production was directed by Ellis Rabb
Ellis Rabb
Ellis Rabb was an American actor and director who in 1959 formed the Association of Producing Artists, a theatre company that brought new works and noteworthy revivals to Broadway and to regional theatres...
and starred Richard Easton
Richard Easton
Richard Easton is a Canadian actor. He is best known in for his portrayal of Brian Hammond in the 1970s BBC serial The Brothers.-Biography:...
as the King, Patricia Conolly
Patricia Conolly
Patricia Conolly is an Australian stage actress.-Biography:Conolly began her stage career in Australia where she grew up, and has performed in England in the West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Chichester Festival Theatre ; in Canada for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival; and on Broadway,...
as Queen Marie, Eva Le Gallienne
Eva Le Gallienne
Eva Le Gallienne was a well-known actress, producer, and director, during the first half of the 20th century.-Early life and early career:...
as Queen Marguerite, and Pamela Payton-Wright
Pamela Payton-Wright
-Biography:Payton-Wright was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Eleanor Ruth and Gordon Edgar Payton-Wright. She graduated from the Birmingham-Southern College in 1963. She began her television career in 1972 as Rhonda on Corky...
as Juliette.