Exit the King
Playwright: Eugène Ionesco Translated and directed by: Patrick Marber Olivier, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). Until 6 October Running time: 1hr 40mins
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Theatre of the Absurd “delighted some audiences and baffled many more”, said David Lister in The Independent. It was a dramatic format that explored life’s deepest questions through “surreal plots and settings and crazed, sometimes nonsensical dialogue”. It is thus pretty “astonishing” that the National Theatre has never before performed a work by one of the movement’s chief architects, the French-romanian playwright, Eugène Ionesco. But now, for his first outing, they’ve gone allout by putting on Exit the King, a mostly plotless meditation on the inevitability of death, and staging it in the National’s largest space, the hard-to-fill Olivier. Does the risk come off?
On balance – yes, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. The play concerns a 483-year-old king, Bérenger, who is refusing to die. But he’s not the only one on his last legs: everything in the cosmos is failing. The Milky Way has curled up “like a dead dog”; 10,000 of the kingdom’s bistros have been abandoned; and the king is told at the start that he will pop his clogs “at the end of the play”. So far, so niche. “I went in sceptical about Ionesco’s ability to deliver more than a quizzical eyebrow over the proscenium arch” – but, astonishingly, the drama, in Patrick Marber’s supple English version, turns out to be “humane as well as brainy”, and ultimately moving.
In my view, the play “promises more than it delivers”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. However, there is no gainsaying the brilliance of Rhys Ifans’ turn as Bérenger. With his “lanky frame, his incisive tenor bark and his Plantagenet wig”, Ifans has “exactly the right air of tyrannical authority tinged with terror”. It’s a treat of a performance, and it made me long to see this outstanding actor in the big Shakespeare roles. Even so, I fear that Ifans is not enough on his own to rescue the play, said Ann Treneman in The Times. As the evening progressed, several spectators were “developing their own exit plan, heads bobbing in a way that signalled sleep was nigh”. Exit the king? “Or, frankly, vamoose the theatre? By the end, I know which I would choose.”