Theatre Paul Bailey
EXIT THE KING ARISTOCRATS
The word ‘absurdist’ has been used to describe the work of Eugène Ionesco for far too long. It’s a convenient term suggestive of knockabout farce of the kind in which nothing makes sense. Actors and directors have been encouraged by the ‘absurdist’ tag to let rip with funny business of the unfunniest variety in order to emphasise the sheer ridiculousness of what they assumed to be Ionesco’s vision of the world.
They were misguided in their assumption. Ionesco is a very serious playwright indeed, as serious in his radically different way as his friend Samuel Beckett, another exile who chose French as his writing language and Paris as his permanent home.
Ionesco said goodbye to Nazified Romania in 1939 and never returned. He left the country of his birth with a loathing of those in authority that would endure for the rest of his life. That loathing is given overt expression in his most famous play Rhinoceros. It’s there in everything he wrote, as he makes clear in his autobiography Present Past, Past Present, in which he recounts how his father, a successful lawyer, changed his political convictions whenever a new party came into power.
The only production in English that has done justice to Ionesco’s genius was staged in 1998, when Simon Mcburney directed Geraldine Mcewan and Richard Briers in a revival of The Chairs. Those brilliant actors, their talents grounded in light comedy, played the deranged elderly couple as if they were just like the nice folks next door, with triumphant results.
Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Ionesco’s Exit the King, which he has also directed, is playing at the Olivier until early October. It takes very few liberties with the original text and boasts an astonishing central performance by Rhys Ifans as King Bérenger, the ancient monarch who is scared to death of dying.
Bérenger appears in other plays as a representative of the ordinary man but, in this essentially melancholy piece, he spends most of the time on a throne, adjusting his crown when he needs to and making demands that are largely ignored. His first wife, Queen Marguerite (a splendidly caustic Indira Varma), sits on his right, and his second, much younger, Queen Marie (a flighty Amy Morgan), on his left.
In attendance are the literally long- suffering Juliette, a maid-of-all-work who looks too old to be the king’s carer, and The Doctor, who is, of course, a quack on the grand scale.
Debra Gillett resists the temptation to present Juliette as a cockney caution and Adrian Scarborough is mischievously funny as he dispenses medical wisdom. High up in the battlements of the royal castle, Derek Griffiths looks down on the proceedings as The Guard. He delivers a speech towards the end in which he salutes his king with the kind of hyperbole that is expected of a faithful courtier. Griffiths speaks it in an almost robotic fashion before returning to his watch.
Ifans, who was a memorable Fool to Glenda Jackson’s Lear and a Scrooge to match the great Alistair Sim’s, is in his element as the fearful Bérenger. Even when he has nothing to say, his face leaves you in no doubt as to what he is thinking. Ifans has the most expressive limbs imaginable – a flailing arm and a twitching leg convey his terror immediately. Anthony Ward’s sets and Hugh Vanstone’s subtle lighting add to the pleasures of this timely production.
Perhaps Ionesco had the dissolute King Carol II in mind when he wrote Exit the King. He was still the reigning monarch in Romania in 1939. I like to think that the impish dramatist was aware that Carol’s English biographer was none other than that unparalleled empress of schlock, the ever-radiant Barbara Cartland. That’s a real cause for laughter.
Brian Friel’s Aristocrats, newly revived at the Donmar Warehouse, is one of his lesser works. It’s set in a decaying country house, Ballybeg Hall in Donegal, in the 1970s. In director Lyndsey Turner’s hands, any sense of atmosphere is dispelled from the outset, with a doll’s house representing the Hall, while the cast make their way around it. The inhabitants, past and present, have gathered for a wedding and end up attending a funeral.
Aristocrats invites comparisons with Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in almost every scene. There’s even a character resembling Firs, the old retainer, in the form of Uncle George, who stopped speaking years ago.
The only person of real interest is Casimir, a fantasist who is married to a German woman, with whom he communicates by phone. David Dawson is marvellous as this repressed homosexual who talks glowingly of his children in Hamburg. He is sometimes painful to watch, which I mean as praise. Otherwise, this is sub-chekhov, with all too familiar Irish failures taking the place of the Russian master’s injured human beings.