Bath.
EXIT THE KING
by Eugène Ionesco translated by Jeremy Sams.
Ustinov Studio Saw Close BA1 1 To 20 December 2014.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm.
Post-show Discussion 11 Dec 7.45pm.
Runs 1hr 50min No interval.
TICKETS: 01225 448844.
www.theatreroyal.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 December.
Triumph of actors and director with an intransigent play.
Samuel Beckett (an Irishman living in Paris) and Eugène Ionesco (a Romanian, Ionescu, living in Paris) were the lead figures in Martin Esslin’s landmark 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd. But the differences are considerable; Beckett’s most famous play is about people waiting for someone to arrive, this piece is about someone waiting to go.
And, while Ionesco’s surface mood is more comic than Beckett’s, Exit is far less hopeful than Waiting for Godot. The king is waiting to die as all around dissolves. A cracked wall leans inwards, stuck with red tape in Anna Fleishle’s set, which mixes degraded grandeur and toytown simplicity.
Is this a palace? There are pompous entries but the throne resembles an over-ambitious armchair. And one of the queens (there are two, who might be assertive wife and desirable mistress) keeps referring to the royal chamber as a sitting-room, while the King is Berenger I, the royal version of a name Ionesco repeatedly used. The rot has set in, domestically and nationally.
This is about any person, in any living-room, who sees himself (this was 1962), and is seen by the family around as the most important person in the world. It’s a delusion, as Alun Armstrong shows in his increasingly bent, tired and petulant Berenger.
Armstrong’s Berenger provides a slow-motion personality car-crash of a performance. And director Laurence Boswell assures equal precision from his court, from Siobhan Redmond’s critical Queen Margaret and Beth Park’s desirably pleasant young Queen Marie to the finely-performed sidelines courtiers, Marty Cruikshank as the ever-dependable old nurse and William Gaunt as the smartly-attired, brisk yet burnt-out medic.
And Roy Sampson’s Guard, a figure from a town-square clock, lets the sugar-coating of importance gradually slip, sinking his pronouncements of the obvious towards dutiful formality.
A sign of Boswell’s success is that a play which, like many of Ionesco’s, paints an arresting picture but has no story providing propulsion, can still keep the attention; for, while other theatres have star-studded casts, over three years the adventurous Ustinov programming has increasingly attracted artists acknowledged as eminent by theatre-makers and avid theatregoers alike.
Guard: Roy Sampson.
Queen Margaret: Siobhan Redmond.
Juliette: Marty Cruikshank.
Queen Marie: Beth Park.
Doctor: William Gaunt.
King Berenger I: Alun Armstrong.
Director: Laurence Boswell.
Designer: Anna Fleischle.
Lighting: Joshua Carr.
Sound/Composer: Isobel Waller-Bridge.
Choreographer: Isabel Mortimer.
Assistant director: Cara Nolan.
Guard: Roy Sampson.
Queen Margaret: Siobhan Redmond.
Juliette: Marty Cruikshank.
Queen Marie: Beth Park.
Doctor: William Gaunt.
King Berenger I: Alun Armstrong.
Director: Laurence Boswell.
Designer: Anna Fleischle.
Lighting: Joshua Carr.
Sound/Composer: Isobel Waller-Bridge.
Choreographer: Isabel Mortimer.
Assistant director: Cara Nolan.
2014-12-08 15:07:11
