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Three Plays: Exit the King / The Killer / Macbett
Exit the King is a highly stylized, ritualized death rite unfolding the final hours of the once-great king Berenger the First. As he dies, his kingdom also dies. His armies suffer defeat, the young emigrate, the seasons change overnight, and his kingdom’s borders shrink to the outline of his throne. At last, as the curtain falls, the king himself dissolves into a gray mist.
The Killer is a study of pure evil. Bérenger, a conscientious citizen, finds himself in a radiantly beautiful city marred only by the presence of a killer. Bérenger’s determination to find the murderer in the face of official indifference and his final defeat at the hands of an impersonal, pitiless cruelty speak with the universality of Kafka’s The Trial.
Macbett, inspired by Shakespeare’s play, is “a grotesque joke . . . [and] a very funny play. . . . Ionecso maliciously undermines sources and traditions, spoofing Shakespeare along with tragedy.”—Mel Gussow, The New York Times
The Killer is a study of pure evil. Bérenger, a conscientious citizen, finds himself in a radiantly beautiful city marred only by the presence of a killer. Bérenger’s determination to find the murderer in the face of official indifference and his final defeat at the hands of an impersonal, pitiless cruelty speak with the universality of Kafka’s The Trial.
Macbett, inspired by Shakespeare’s play, is “a grotesque joke . . . [and] a very funny play. . . . Ionecso maliciously undermines sources and traditions, spoofing Shakespeare along with tragedy.”—Mel Gussow, The New York Times
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 13, 1974
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241 people want to read
About the author
Eugène Ionesco
455 books954 followersEugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu, was a Romanian playwright and dramatist; one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict in a tangible way the solitude and insignificance of human existence.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 23, 2017
This is the first time I have seriously considered Eugène Ionesco’s work. Several years ago, I read and enjoyed The Rhinocéros, but it wasn’t until I discovered that Ionesco adapted Macbeth that I became seriously interested in him. Even with a wildly intriguing play like The Rhinocéros, Ionesco remains something of a mystery to me. I cannot tell if and when I am to take him serious, and I suppose that is by design. These moments of tonal ambiguity afford directors and actors the opportunity to make Ionesco what they need him to be, which is a liberating proposition. Yet, if the plays in this collection are representative of Ionesco’s larger body of work, then I cannot image any competent production wouldn’t decide to cut heavily. Each of these plays brim with needlessly rambling sections that pull and distract from each play’s uniquely crafted message and aesthetic.
Exit the King
Of the three, Exit the King is the most interesting and affecting. Ionesco tells the story of an infirmed monarch (not unlike Shakespeare’s Lear) who swiftly experiences the subtleties of death. As his surly first wife Marie explains, the King has refused to accept the limits of his power and the inevitability of death; therefore, the King learns how to “accept death and die” while also learning “indifference and serenity” which culminates in “resignation!” (54). Even as I write this, I cannot ignore the potential banality of what I just wrote. In the hands of a less capable dramatist, Exit the King would be an insufferable cliché, but Ionesco discovers genuine pathos in this otherwise tired conceit. Yet, the problem with Exit the King is tone. I want to read this play again because there do not seem to be any clear markers indicating how sincere a reader should read lines such as the ones I quoted above.
The Killer
Too often, The Killer is a frustrating play. The conceit is clever enough, but unlike Exit the King and Macbett, it does not work well on the page. Too often, the play drags and meanders at a frustratingly petty pace. The final few pages salvage the play, but The Killer would be better severed with deliberate edits that focus the play around its central protagonist, Bérenger.
Macbett
Part farce yet part cautionary tale, Ionesco’s Macbett wonderfully decontextualizing and satires one of Shakespeare’s most horrifying plays. Like Exit the King, I want to reread this play again before I write anything else about it, so at some point, I may add to my commentary here. Nevertheless, the play has several interesting things to say about political rhetoric and how political rhetoric functions in both public and private spaces.
Exit the King
Of the three, Exit the King is the most interesting and affecting. Ionesco tells the story of an infirmed monarch (not unlike Shakespeare’s Lear) who swiftly experiences the subtleties of death. As his surly first wife Marie explains, the King has refused to accept the limits of his power and the inevitability of death; therefore, the King learns how to “accept death and die” while also learning “indifference and serenity” which culminates in “resignation!” (54). Even as I write this, I cannot ignore the potential banality of what I just wrote. In the hands of a less capable dramatist, Exit the King would be an insufferable cliché, but Ionesco discovers genuine pathos in this otherwise tired conceit. Yet, the problem with Exit the King is tone. I want to read this play again because there do not seem to be any clear markers indicating how sincere a reader should read lines such as the ones I quoted above.
The Killer
Too often, The Killer is a frustrating play. The conceit is clever enough, but unlike Exit the King and Macbett, it does not work well on the page. Too often, the play drags and meanders at a frustratingly petty pace. The final few pages salvage the play, but The Killer would be better severed with deliberate edits that focus the play around its central protagonist, Bérenger.
Macbett
Part farce yet part cautionary tale, Ionesco’s Macbett wonderfully decontextualizing and satires one of Shakespeare’s most horrifying plays. Like Exit the King, I want to reread this play again before I write anything else about it, so at some point, I may add to my commentary here. Nevertheless, the play has several interesting things to say about political rhetoric and how political rhetoric functions in both public and private spaces.
June 12, 2007
vase inke doroogh nagam man az in 3 ta fagaht avalio khoondam,vali joda nabood ke add konam:)
December 26, 2023
I prefer Ionesco’s short plays. These can drag once you get the point. The most complex, Killer, is on dreams/innocence falling to despair/evil.
May 16, 2024
"Exit the King" ripped my heart out and ate it in front of me. Of course death is always surprising, even though it's always expected. Time speeds up the older we get. Bodies start to crumble, to refuse following orders. The world, a mirror of the body, also breaks down, gets smaller, crumbles down to a small fetal position. We're born and we die like that.
The king's two wives are the optimistic / idealistic versus the pragmatic / rational. These two duel for the heart and mind of the dying man, steering him from despair to delusion and back again. Sometimes it's darkly funny, like when the guard repeats ludicrous announcements such as "Long Live the King! The King is Dead!" But perhaps the most horrifying part is the loss of agency, the fact that the king, and by extension all of us reading this, have no say. "You're no longer your own master" says the pragmatic doctor. But it's one thing when the physical body weakens, and it's an entirely different thing when language loses its power. I might be able to cope with a broken body, but not a broken mind. I recently learned that the ability to draw a clock with the hours labelled in a clockwise direction is one test they do to check for alzhimers. I remember seeing some modernist artwork of a clock with the numbers falling down inside the clock. There's something existentially terrifying in that; perhaps it's the loss of predictability. After a lifetime of increasing mastery, nearness to death suddenly makes us childlike again, going somewhere radically new, suddenly over-aged neophytes.
In "Exit the King," the titular character's kingdom slowly ceases following his commands. This is how it feels for writers who can command and control their own worlds. Any creatives understand this feeling, but the slow loss of it spells the ultimate end. I see a glimmer of this fear in the eyes of the Metallica boys every time I see them on this last tour. They're dripping every last drop of sweat and effort to prove they're still the 20-year olds who wrote this genre-defining music. But it can't last. And they know it. Each show, each song, each note must feel like it's close to breaking, like it could be their last. But living is a young man's game.
"Kings ought to be immortal." We all feel this way, or at least act this way, as if we have unlimited time. I remember watching the soap opera "Days of Our Lives" as a kid, and the show's motto was "Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives." It showed a crappy CG hourglass with the sand falling, and it always vaguely scared me. It felt like a threat. Later, I wondered about the people who worked on that show, recording episodes every single day for most of the year, then having a month or two off before they needed to record the next year's episodes. At that point it's no longer an art, just a day job, just a marathon. It must be the worst place to end up as an actor or editor, being stuck in this hamster wheel of media. But at least it feels immortal, because every episode has the same hazy vibe, the same characters in the same outfits. Just like real life, nothing seemed to change from day to day in the show, but if I watched it now, the few characters I'd recognize would look much older, if they're even still there.
But we don't like to think about this. King: "I did think about it." Marguerite: "Not seriously, not profoundly, never with all your heart and soul." We like to think that we like to think about death, but we're so afraid. Even those of us who hang out around skulls and heavy metal and even crucifixes, we never really think about death. But even just a little bit of death meditation goes a long way. "All you have now is one hour...A well spent hour's better than whole centuries of neglect and failure. Five minutes are enough, ten fully conscious seconds." The play keeps making these self-aware remarks about how long the play has left, like we sometimes do, we who joke about blowing our brains out at the smallest inconvenience. But we don't really mean it. I know way too many people who unironically attempt to over-stimulate themselves so they don't have to think about their own mortality. For what else could Marvel movies and fast food be good for? One distracts you while the other shortens your life. I'm fully convinced that many people are committing slow versions of suicide, many people who are too cowardly to even take a rash action, let alone a rational, self-improving one.
But thinking about it is painful, and it always feels like we're the first. Marguerite: "He imagines no one's ever died before." Marie: "No one has died before." We can be excused for wholeheartedly believing this, because everything has to be re-learned by every person. I once had a flash of understanding when I realized the true meaning of the "blank slate" idea. Unlike Locke's emphasis on the individual self-determination and uniqueness, I think the more interesting thing to ponder is how everyone's education must always start over. No one starts with any sizable concepts (other than perhaps a longing for love, and a longing for God, which might not be different things). I remember this hitting me especially hard when I heard the news of Roger Scruton's passing. A whole life's worth of learning, all the subtleties and experiences and shades of understanding... lost, just like that. Of course, he had his biases, chose what he wanted to learn, but we all do. That's not really a flaw to be bemoaned but, to return to Locke, an opportunity to be celebrated. Furthermore, this is something I think about often when teaching my students, how each of them are behind or sometimes ahead of where I want them to be, or where "they should be."
But things progress. The king starts getting scared, starts screaming incoherently, starts bargaining, begging for a chance, even a small chance, that this is just a nightmare, that he'll wake up as a child again. He recognizes the return to the childish, begs for his mother (fuck you Freud, this is deeper than you could imagine). The problem is that as he (we?) starts becoming more childish, so does his temperament: he starts getting selfish like a toddler, starts to lose his decorum and say hurtful things. One of the most selfish things I've ever read was "Let every human creature die provided I can live forever, even alone in a limitless desert."
Time starts compressing and elongating in bizarre ways. King: "Why was I born if it wasn't forever? Damn my parents! What a joke, what a farce! I came into the world five minutes ago. I got married three minutes ago." Marguerite: "Two hundred and eighty-three years." King: I came to the throne two and a half minutes ago." The king next moves to begging the dead, his forebears to provide some sort of guidance. But that's what reading during your life is supposed to do. There's no wikipedia page you can read at the last minute to get caught up, no simple instructional video. It's a lifelong preparation. All our lives are a preparation for our deaths.
The king gets a second wind, but it only makes matters worse, only gives him false hope. Apparently natural death does this. You slowly eat less, drink less, move less, then one day you feel really good again, like you're rebounding. But that uses up the rest of your energy, and you're almost entirely gone by that point. As he's on the way back down, the King denies Marie, the optimistic/idealistic wife. He denies her love, and it broke my heart to read it. Eventually he stops recognizing her, her name, her voice. "He knows what not knowing means." They start talking about him in the past tense, despite him still being alive, still sitting there. But there's many people who live each day as if they're dead. It's so easy to succumb to that daze, to letting the days blur by with nothing unique in any of them, doing the same comfortable thing.
Slowly, the other characters fade away, the things tying him to this land are dissolved. We often fixate so much on the things that we might lose that we forget the worries we also part with. As Socrates argues in his Apology, "There is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things--either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another." Though it's logically sound, it might not have the pathos needed. That's where "Exit the King" comes in; though much of it is heart-rending and terrifying, its catharsis places it among some of the best plays I've read. I love this play, and I hope I'll get many more opportunities to read it while I'm still alive. Ionesco's whole life was justified by writing this one play. Thank you Eugene.
[The only reason I deducted a star off of the rating was because Macbett was kinda a copy/paste mess and not that interesting. BUT "EXIT THE KING" THO.]
The king's two wives are the optimistic / idealistic versus the pragmatic / rational. These two duel for the heart and mind of the dying man, steering him from despair to delusion and back again. Sometimes it's darkly funny, like when the guard repeats ludicrous announcements such as "Long Live the King! The King is Dead!" But perhaps the most horrifying part is the loss of agency, the fact that the king, and by extension all of us reading this, have no say. "You're no longer your own master" says the pragmatic doctor. But it's one thing when the physical body weakens, and it's an entirely different thing when language loses its power. I might be able to cope with a broken body, but not a broken mind. I recently learned that the ability to draw a clock with the hours labelled in a clockwise direction is one test they do to check for alzhimers. I remember seeing some modernist artwork of a clock with the numbers falling down inside the clock. There's something existentially terrifying in that; perhaps it's the loss of predictability. After a lifetime of increasing mastery, nearness to death suddenly makes us childlike again, going somewhere radically new, suddenly over-aged neophytes.
In "Exit the King," the titular character's kingdom slowly ceases following his commands. This is how it feels for writers who can command and control their own worlds. Any creatives understand this feeling, but the slow loss of it spells the ultimate end. I see a glimmer of this fear in the eyes of the Metallica boys every time I see them on this last tour. They're dripping every last drop of sweat and effort to prove they're still the 20-year olds who wrote this genre-defining music. But it can't last. And they know it. Each show, each song, each note must feel like it's close to breaking, like it could be their last. But living is a young man's game.
"Kings ought to be immortal." We all feel this way, or at least act this way, as if we have unlimited time. I remember watching the soap opera "Days of Our Lives" as a kid, and the show's motto was "Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives." It showed a crappy CG hourglass with the sand falling, and it always vaguely scared me. It felt like a threat. Later, I wondered about the people who worked on that show, recording episodes every single day for most of the year, then having a month or two off before they needed to record the next year's episodes. At that point it's no longer an art, just a day job, just a marathon. It must be the worst place to end up as an actor or editor, being stuck in this hamster wheel of media. But at least it feels immortal, because every episode has the same hazy vibe, the same characters in the same outfits. Just like real life, nothing seemed to change from day to day in the show, but if I watched it now, the few characters I'd recognize would look much older, if they're even still there.
But we don't like to think about this. King: "I did think about it." Marguerite: "Not seriously, not profoundly, never with all your heart and soul." We like to think that we like to think about death, but we're so afraid. Even those of us who hang out around skulls and heavy metal and even crucifixes, we never really think about death. But even just a little bit of death meditation goes a long way. "All you have now is one hour...A well spent hour's better than whole centuries of neglect and failure. Five minutes are enough, ten fully conscious seconds." The play keeps making these self-aware remarks about how long the play has left, like we sometimes do, we who joke about blowing our brains out at the smallest inconvenience. But we don't really mean it. I know way too many people who unironically attempt to over-stimulate themselves so they don't have to think about their own mortality. For what else could Marvel movies and fast food be good for? One distracts you while the other shortens your life. I'm fully convinced that many people are committing slow versions of suicide, many people who are too cowardly to even take a rash action, let alone a rational, self-improving one.
But thinking about it is painful, and it always feels like we're the first. Marguerite: "He imagines no one's ever died before." Marie: "No one has died before." We can be excused for wholeheartedly believing this, because everything has to be re-learned by every person. I once had a flash of understanding when I realized the true meaning of the "blank slate" idea. Unlike Locke's emphasis on the individual self-determination and uniqueness, I think the more interesting thing to ponder is how everyone's education must always start over. No one starts with any sizable concepts (other than perhaps a longing for love, and a longing for God, which might not be different things). I remember this hitting me especially hard when I heard the news of Roger Scruton's passing. A whole life's worth of learning, all the subtleties and experiences and shades of understanding... lost, just like that. Of course, he had his biases, chose what he wanted to learn, but we all do. That's not really a flaw to be bemoaned but, to return to Locke, an opportunity to be celebrated. Furthermore, this is something I think about often when teaching my students, how each of them are behind or sometimes ahead of where I want them to be, or where "they should be."
But things progress. The king starts getting scared, starts screaming incoherently, starts bargaining, begging for a chance, even a small chance, that this is just a nightmare, that he'll wake up as a child again. He recognizes the return to the childish, begs for his mother (fuck you Freud, this is deeper than you could imagine). The problem is that as he (we?) starts becoming more childish, so does his temperament: he starts getting selfish like a toddler, starts to lose his decorum and say hurtful things. One of the most selfish things I've ever read was "Let every human creature die provided I can live forever, even alone in a limitless desert."
Time starts compressing and elongating in bizarre ways. King: "Why was I born if it wasn't forever? Damn my parents! What a joke, what a farce! I came into the world five minutes ago. I got married three minutes ago." Marguerite: "Two hundred and eighty-three years." King: I came to the throne two and a half minutes ago." The king next moves to begging the dead, his forebears to provide some sort of guidance. But that's what reading during your life is supposed to do. There's no wikipedia page you can read at the last minute to get caught up, no simple instructional video. It's a lifelong preparation. All our lives are a preparation for our deaths.
The king gets a second wind, but it only makes matters worse, only gives him false hope. Apparently natural death does this. You slowly eat less, drink less, move less, then one day you feel really good again, like you're rebounding. But that uses up the rest of your energy, and you're almost entirely gone by that point. As he's on the way back down, the King denies Marie, the optimistic/idealistic wife. He denies her love, and it broke my heart to read it. Eventually he stops recognizing her, her name, her voice. "He knows what not knowing means." They start talking about him in the past tense, despite him still being alive, still sitting there. But there's many people who live each day as if they're dead. It's so easy to succumb to that daze, to letting the days blur by with nothing unique in any of them, doing the same comfortable thing.
Slowly, the other characters fade away, the things tying him to this land are dissolved. We often fixate so much on the things that we might lose that we forget the worries we also part with. As Socrates argues in his Apology, "There is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things--either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another." Though it's logically sound, it might not have the pathos needed. That's where "Exit the King" comes in; though much of it is heart-rending and terrifying, its catharsis places it among some of the best plays I've read. I love this play, and I hope I'll get many more opportunities to read it while I'm still alive. Ionesco's whole life was justified by writing this one play. Thank you Eugene.
[The only reason I deducted a star off of the rating was because Macbett was kinda a copy/paste mess and not that interesting. BUT "EXIT THE KING" THO.]
November 9, 2007
این نمایش نامه ی اوژن یونسکو توسط احمد کامیابی سال ها پیش به فارسی برگردانده شده بود اما سانسور آریامهری به دلیل نامش، از چاپ و انتشار آن جلوگیری کرد تا بالاخره در 1360 توسط انتشارات پیشگام چاپ و منتشر شد.
در مورد "تیاتر ابزورد" اینجا را بخوانید
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در مورد "تیاتر ابزورد" اینجا را بخوانید
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
November 10, 2014
I read this book for my independent study in philosophy during my undergraduate program. The study, The Meaning of Death, delved into the many interpretations of death. Lud Schlecht is the one who recommended this play for me.
July 3, 2007
every english translation i've been able to find just doesnt get it right. exit the king would be an extremely good play to put up now. timely and adaptable to current climates.
April 25, 2009
Absurdly true. Exit the King: The dramatic self-conscious is witty and makes the play for me. Impressive even now.
July 16, 2009
I think Exit the King lost me a bit, and The Killer lost me a bit, and then Macbett put everything back in place, by delivering the single most ridiculous line in any book I have ever read.
Read
September 6, 2011Three plays from the king of absurd theater, Eugene Ionesco.
April 17, 2021
Only read exit the king but I really enjoyed it. Interesting and entertaining read, some interesting ideas about existentialism. Would read the rest if I still had the book with me...
September 28, 2025
Another epic dramas by Ionesco focusing on the death theme and desperate disagreeing/fighting with it as well as trying to anwser what is the most important in life and what is fake. All written with incredible sense of humour which for me deserves a broader recognition!!
July 16, 2020
I read "Exit the King" and I got thrilled -again- by his magical pen.
I wish people could study them at school and creative writing groups, besides Performance Art courses. A great absurdist comedy!
I wish people could study them at school and creative writing groups, besides Performance Art courses. A great absurdist comedy!
November 11, 2022
I have mixed feelings about "Exit the King". On the one hand, it's enigmatic, inspiring, and profound... from the other, I found myself speedreading through it.
June 29, 2025
Of the three dramatic works in this edition, I thought "Exit the King" was the most thought -provoking work.
The first work I read this drama collection was the short play, Macbett. I believe it is the last dramatic work Ionesco published. I am well versed in Shakespeare and was curious to see Ionesco's take on it. For me it wasn't a satire or spoof on Shakespeare as it was a kind of reduction--a simplification of it. Shakespearean characters and scenes were fused or omitted (Ionesco alters their names a bit in order that the audience would distinguish them from the Shakespeare tragedy), but Ionesco, I think, keeps with the main "thrust" (pun intended) which deals with the unconscious thirst for power and greed that lay immovably in the human heart.
The one main deviation with Shakespeare in my eyes comes at the end, when Malcol (Malcolm) arrives; rather than have a Shakespearean restoration of order, the new leader vows to be even more bloodthirsty than Macbett and Duncan who both preceded him. It is the nature of power to thirst for more power, not to share it, not to bring about a better, more just, world.
Ionesco's Existentialist vision is that life is absurd. Man will never be able to master it, bring order to it, or even to understand it. Our actions are ultimately meaningless. As Macbett says at the end of the play, "Everything slips through your fingers. We unleash forces that we cannot control and which end up by turning against us. Everything turns out the opposite of what you wanted. Man doesn't rule events, events rule him..." These lines, of course, mimic the famous Shakespearean speech, in which Macbeth defines life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. "
-----------------------------------
i read "The Killer" second. I found the first act and the play's final scene philosophically interesting. With the concept of the "radiant city" I think Ionesco is exploring the idea of whether human beings can achieve a state, a world, of happiness. Ionesco's pessimistic answer is a resounding, no, with the arrival of the killer. Evil, chaos, brutality will always find a way to creep in and triumph over humanitarian values, over civilization. Any lasting contentment is an impossibility with the reality of death always hovering and ultimately taking us.
-----------------------------------
I read "Exit the King" last. It was a bit of a slog to get through, due to the lack of action and the predictable outcome/ It features Berenger as the King, Ionesco's everyman, who is also the protagonist of "Rhinoceros." In this play he represents mankind through the ages, but he also has a mythic role as well. The play takes us through the rite of death, as Berenger, typical of all of us, tries futilely to hold on to life, but is forced to acknowledge his impending end as the throws of death encroach him from every side--intellectually & physically. (But the rite also takes on a religious, ritualistic dimension as well.) He struggles in a very human way to come to terms with the reality that the walls of the world he created, ordered and mastered, is literally crumbling before his eyes--his own strength and health in old age has suddenly collapsing. Berenger is ultimately rendered impotent and helpless--making his reign a utter failure-- his accomplishments forgotten in posterity. Death renders our actions pointless, ineffectual--life becomes nothing but an absurd joke in the end.
The first work I read this drama collection was the short play, Macbett. I believe it is the last dramatic work Ionesco published. I am well versed in Shakespeare and was curious to see Ionesco's take on it. For me it wasn't a satire or spoof on Shakespeare as it was a kind of reduction--a simplification of it. Shakespearean characters and scenes were fused or omitted (Ionesco alters their names a bit in order that the audience would distinguish them from the Shakespeare tragedy), but Ionesco, I think, keeps with the main "thrust" (pun intended) which deals with the unconscious thirst for power and greed that lay immovably in the human heart.
The one main deviation with Shakespeare in my eyes comes at the end, when Malcol (Malcolm) arrives; rather than have a Shakespearean restoration of order, the new leader vows to be even more bloodthirsty than Macbett and Duncan who both preceded him. It is the nature of power to thirst for more power, not to share it, not to bring about a better, more just, world.
Ionesco's Existentialist vision is that life is absurd. Man will never be able to master it, bring order to it, or even to understand it. Our actions are ultimately meaningless. As Macbett says at the end of the play, "Everything slips through your fingers. We unleash forces that we cannot control and which end up by turning against us. Everything turns out the opposite of what you wanted. Man doesn't rule events, events rule him..." These lines, of course, mimic the famous Shakespearean speech, in which Macbeth defines life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. "
-----------------------------------
i read "The Killer" second. I found the first act and the play's final scene philosophically interesting. With the concept of the "radiant city" I think Ionesco is exploring the idea of whether human beings can achieve a state, a world, of happiness. Ionesco's pessimistic answer is a resounding, no, with the arrival of the killer. Evil, chaos, brutality will always find a way to creep in and triumph over humanitarian values, over civilization. Any lasting contentment is an impossibility with the reality of death always hovering and ultimately taking us.
-----------------------------------
I read "Exit the King" last. It was a bit of a slog to get through, due to the lack of action and the predictable outcome/ It features Berenger as the King, Ionesco's everyman, who is also the protagonist of "Rhinoceros." In this play he represents mankind through the ages, but he also has a mythic role as well. The play takes us through the rite of death, as Berenger, typical of all of us, tries futilely to hold on to life, but is forced to acknowledge his impending end as the throws of death encroach him from every side--intellectually & physically. (But the rite also takes on a religious, ritualistic dimension as well.) He struggles in a very human way to come to terms with the reality that the walls of the world he created, ordered and mastered, is literally crumbling before his eyes--his own strength and health in old age has suddenly collapsing. Berenger is ultimately rendered impotent and helpless--making his reign a utter failure-- his accomplishments forgotten in posterity. Death renders our actions pointless, ineffectual--life becomes nothing but an absurd joke in the end.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 30, 2021
Malcolm’s ending monologue
June 20, 2009
Exit the King gets five stars. The other two, I think I need to see on stage...
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews