I’ve read several reviews of the current Broadway production of Exit the King that I’ve found very intriguing. I hadn’t read the play, so I picked it up. It’s… not very good.
I love Rhinocerous, as I know I’ve said here before, and I like The Chairs and some of his other plays. Exit the King has some good stuff in it, but overall it didn’t seem particularly good. For those who haven’t read it (and for some reason are still reading this note), Berengar is the King, having lived four hundred years of declining mental, medical, political and metaphysical power. Now, he is at last going to die. Dying has gone from a thing that will happen someday to a thing that will happen at the end of the play, in an hour and a half. He fights that destiny, unsuccessfully, in the company of a guard, a doctor/astrologer/executioner, a maid-of-all-work, and two queens. The rest of his subjects, the rest of his kingdom, are gone. It’s all dwindled down to this: his sceptre, his queens, his wheelchair, his pyjamas, his ermine robe, his death.
There’s a sense in which the play seems very topical: it’s America that is dying, once the powerhouse of the world, the super-powerhouse, the King, now falling under its own weight. Or: it’s civilization that is dying, modernity, the electrified and petroleated world we thought would last forever, sunk under the waves and coughing up coal dust. Or: what you will. Which is a problem, I think. There’s a bit of an excess of generality, which takes away from that topicality, because it feels like it would be equally topical anywhere and anywhen. It’s more Samuel Beckett than Eugene Ionesco, in feeling. Not that Beckettism is a Bad Thing. This play has in common with some of my favorite Beckett (and Ionesco for that matter) that it is a structure to be draped with Bits of Business. Sceptre jokes, hat moves, death. Funny stuff.
I will say this production looks like a terrific show. I wish I could go and see it, you know, without paying any money or losing any time doing anything else, or having to make any plans of any kind. Perhaps I’m dying, too, and have only four hundred years of dwindling light ahead of me. And sceptre jokes.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.