The rarely performed absurdist play Exit the King by Ionesco gets a rare airing at the National Theatre and leaves you glad to be alive and hopefully much further from death than our principal character King Berenger 1, played stunningly by Rhys Ifans.
PATRICK Marber’s adaptation goes for maximum laughs and early on in this 100 minute romp, they come aplenty.
The King is dead. Long live the king says the bodyguard/royal spokesman, played in robotic good humour by Derek Griffiths. Yet there is no next king. Berenger has reigned for an improbable 483 years and fake news has it that he invented everything from the aeroplane to nuclear fission while penning the plays of Shakespeare.
As the play starts – against a huge wall in the throne room, cracked wide open by the destruction which is spreading throughout the kingdom – we learn that in fact the country now measures only 5 square miles and that the 6 characters we meet in the palace are now the entire population.
There is the panto-farce of a doctor/astrologer, played with sardonic but bumptious glee by Adrian Scarborough. And then the queens – two of them; Indira Varma, magnificent as the ex Queen, who struts the stage like Cruella de Ville in black velvet gown and white fur train, her immaculate hair topped with a Diana tiara. And Amy Morgan as the current consort – all whimpering and gushing dumb blond babe in pink.
The characters, completed by the agile but ancient nurse, played with great mischievous relish by Debra Gillett, are all here to hasten the king’s decline to death but in a helpful way – or not.
In his blue silk pyjamas, stopped sometimes by a wobbly crown and sometimes by a woolly hat, Rhys Ifans arrives through an audience which is required to stand – and duly does so – with a magnificent ermine train, but also Heath Ledger Joker makeup . It’s not a good look, and he rapidly ages before our eyes, eventually unable to walk and barely able to speak.
It’s a potent Lear-like image of decay and only partial self-realisation. The play is cleverly set in real-time but the 100 minutes tournament out to feel like 100 years and the last 20 minutes of inaction and poeticising is a real drag.
But in Ifans many soliloquies and reminiscences you could have heard a pin drop in the huge audience, and he fills the acting space and auditorium with a wicked kind of humour interlaced with pathos.
Ultimately the evening is saved with a coup de theatre and a stunning visual ending where guru-like, his first queen guides the king to the next life.
Exit the King is in repertoire at the National Theatre.
Review by Brian Butler
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