![]() Yet he also suggests Berenger’s growing awareness that he must make some amends for his crimes, as when he sits and listens to Juliette’s account of her hardships. Snee’s comic chops are inspired by cartoon invulnerability he takes pratfalls and then rises, alternately raging at and dismissing the news of his and his world’s dissolution. She is above and beyond terror because she knows that they are in a play, and that the curtain must fall with her husband’s death. Marguerite, on the other hand, understands the reality of the situation. Marie worries that, with the King’s demise, she will lose her celebrity status - her endless partying will come to an end. Rather than showing much concern about what he sees happening, the doctor revels in his knack to accurately describe physiological and cosmological collapse. Juliette only knows of her toils as nurse and maid to these pampered and decadent royals. The guard cannot conceive of an existence beyond his ceremonial role. Berenger won’t dare face the consequences of his disastrous rule and his impending death. Ionesco’s Dadaesque comedy is generated by the primal power of denial, inability of the palace’s inhabitants to grasp the enormity of the crisis in front of them. And there are no signs of rejuvenation in Ionesco’s vision - the universe is gone when the King dies. Or is Exit the King a political parable about how dictators, whatever ideologies they cling to, whatever titles they accord themselves, might bring about the end of their own regimes through the abuse of the very powers they exercise? Perhaps, but the suggestion here is that waiting for a tyrannical regime to collapse also means passively watching the destruction they bring about. Could it be that Berenger’s use of godlike powers exhausted the universe (a theme echoed a decade later in Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time novels)? Is the decay that is demolishing his body, his palace, his kingdom, and the cosmos meant to be understood as allegorical? Or his there a mythological message here? Is Ionesco retelling the legend of the Fisher King minus the grail? Or is this a futuristic tale of a dying Earth. Those with long memories recall a time when, before he became infirm, the King wielded a divine will and could exert magical powers: he could compel action with but a word. The doctor suggests that the universe itself is approaching an entropic death, observing that “snow is falling on the North Pole of the sun. ![]() Those young people are uneducable and age prematurely. Now Berenger’s kingdom numbers “only about a thousand old people,” Marie clarifies that there are “forty-five young people”. Marguerite reports that “At the start of his reign there were nine thousand million inhabitants.” (In 1962, when Ionesco wrote Exit the King, the world’s population was only about 3.1 billion). Neglected, the land is eroding away buildings as well as large swathes of land are collapsing through holes in the Earth’s crust. His kingdom is in utter disrepair: innumerable ill-advised wars have shrunk his kingdom’s borders. His scepter is an intravenous drip pole tubes and saline bags hang across the top. He is disheveled, dressed in his pajama pants and an undershirt, a regal red dressing gown, and a paper crown. If he is meant to be the same Berenger who serves as the protagonist in some of Ionesco’s other plays, this past has been long forgotten. But Ionesco’s own tendency is to be more explicitly political and surrealist in his imagery - and this tragicomedy is no exception.īerenger has reigned over his kingdom for four-hundred years. Ionesco echoes Beckett’s thematic concerns - his protagonist undergoes the process of existential obliteration. Many critics have described Exit the King as Ionesco operating in a mode more akin to his contemporary and fellow expatriate absurdist Samuel Becket. ![]() He introduces the play’s cast of characters: King Berenger the First (Richard Snee), Berenger’s first wife, Queen Marguerite (Sarah Newhouse), their nurse and domestic help, Juliette (Rachel Belleman), Berenger’s second wife, Queen Marie (Jesse Hinson), and finally the “Gentleman Court Surgeon, Bacteriologist, Executioner and Astrologist” (Dayenne Walters). Photo: Richard Snee and Sarah Newhouse in the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of “Exit the King.” Photo: Nile Scott Shots.Ī guard (Gunnar Manchester), dressed in a strange hybrid of a business jacket and gladiatorial gear (shin guards, gauntlets and a shoulder guard), strides to a podium – he is head of the palace’s security contingent, but he comes off as more of a master-of-ceremonies.
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