Exit the King takes place in the Goethe filiation, as a natural sequel of Faust (created in 2008 and performed in Edinburgh Festival in 2009), but also of Ovid Metamorphoses (2007), Rabelais Pantagruel (created in 2003 and still performing) and Sade (created in 1999). The central theme is of course the death of the living, giving birth to another form of life…
Kind of spiritual exercise of how to learn to die said Ionesco of his own play. Exorcism, initiation rite, he had first entitled the play Ceremony.
It could be entitled The King Sower! … Sower of rebirth.
With Exit the King Ionesco focuses on this passage, this special moment and this taboo of the cycle of life, the one of the disintegration of being. There are few plays that do this with such rigor!
He does it with a great faith in theater and theatricality. And thus we will.
In this ceremony of the dissolution of the being, everything is a pretext for games, like a children’s game with symbols and references (the King, the Queen, the Jack of the card game).
The scenario in itself is with no surprise. It is as if it was done. And again we see it very well, that’s all us!
That King is of course no King but each of us, king of his own life. And that play is no play, it’s an attempt to tame that ordinary, extraordinary and unbearable story that brings us all together: death, necessary for life to go on…