Long live the King – but not for too much longer. Ross Gumbley’s production of French-Romanian author Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play Exit the King, written in 1962 and translated sharply in 2007 by Geoffrey Rush and Neil Armfield, is a comic extended death scene.

It asks us to ruminate on the inevitability of our own mortality: the end will come for the King by the end of the play whether he likes it or not, just as it will one day come for us. While this reads as grim there is a sense of optimism about the work, for it is not just about how to die well, but how to acknowledge the beauty of being alive.

In the other plays in Ionesco’s ‘Berenger Cycle’ (The Killer, Rhinoceros and A Stroll in the Air), recurring character Berenger is a hapless, naïve everyman, but in Exit the King he is rendered as King Berenger the First (William Walker, channelling King Lear via Roald Dahl): a centuries-old monarch who presides over a once-mighty empire that is literally shrinking, cracking and crumbling away around him. From that, take what satire you will.

His first wife, the sharp-tongued and exasperated Queen Marguerite (the magnificently arch Carmel McGlone), informs him that today, finally, is his long-overdue day to die – something he’s been irresponsibility putting off, given the giddy distractions of being alive.

His second wife, the young Queen Marie (Lauren Gibson), is inconsolable at the thought of losing her husband, for she defines herself by his affections. And the King’s oily Doctor-slash-astrologer-slash-executioner (Steven Ray) will stick things out until he’s rendered obsolete.

A harried maid, Juliette (Kim Garrett), has the Sisyphean task of trying to keep the household running, even as it flakes away around her. All that’s left of the King’s massive army is a single Guard (Tom Trevella, looking like he’s been stranded after Showbiz Christchurch’s production of Spamalot last month), whose addled state-of-the-nation proclamations about the King and his kingdom provide a good deal of comic relief.  

The action takes place in the King’s tawdry, faded marble throne room (designed by Julian Southgate), which is littered with cigarette butts and whose purple velvet curtains are held together by dust, cobwebs and regal willpower. Here, the King’s increasingly desperate bids to show that he’s still alive and rheumatically kicking, and his pleas for death to just give him another good century or so, are marked by farcical hyperbole and physical comedy.

This is a considered and well-designed production. There is a twin sense of exuberance and barely-muted panic that offers a high-energy entry point into the show, and the quick establishment of the farcical nature of the action in the characters’ brisk, silly entrances is a clever way of flagging the show’s comic intentions to an audience who might be a little uncertain as to whether or not death is a laughing matter. 

That said, this production Exit the King is also quite uneven in its pacing and tone. The assertive energy of the opening soon wanes, and the orthodox parts of the staging and characterisation don’t always gel well with the more heightened and unconventional aspects.

This is brought into sharp relief in the final fifteen minutes of the show: a sequence that is delivered with power, baffled horror and restraint, and that culminates in a bit of theatre magic that works magnificently on the broad, deep stage of the Court. It is a beautiful visual representation of the absurd, the unknowable quality of the world and, here, the incomprehensibility of our own deaths.

This part of the play alone is worth the price of admission, and it absolutely nails the tone of Ionesco’s absurdism. It’s also the first time that I get a sense of an honest, intimate and tangible relationship between characters, here between Berenger and Marguerite, who coaxes the King towards death, gently and with compassion, acting as fatalistic intermediary.

This scene’s clarity and focus also sit uncomfortably against the fluffier moments earlier. The comic, farcical sequences the make up much of the show are often genuinely funny; my companion, who likes his comedy black, loves it and says it’s his “favourite type of play”. Yet, the earlier portions of the play don’t have the same sharpness to them. I sometimes find my attention wandering, despite the heightened action and such theatrical conceits as the cast regularly breaking the fourth wall to remind us exactly how long it is until the play, and the King, will meet the final curtain. (This is compounded by the fact that, early on in the play, I can sense movement offstage and through the throne room’s translucent window, and it’s incredibly distracting.)  

I keep waiting for everything to be dialled up a few more notches to that magic, hysteric, uncertain register of hilarity so loved by Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard and so on; the point at which you’re not sure if laughing at the carnage makes you a bad person or not. There is so much promise here, but this production backs away from the precipice rather than dangling dangerously over the edge.

Despite these misgivings I really love that the Court has programmed this piece, and I hope that it finds an audience. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer