Warmongers.('Exit the King' and 'Rambo Solo')(Theater review)

"What the fuck was that!!" King Berenger the First (Geoffrey Rush) exclaims midway through "Exit the King" (at the Barrymore). A storm--brief but "King Lear"-like in its intensity--has just hit his bare-bones, broken-down kingdom, flooding it with light, and then plunging it into momentary darkness. This happened as the King was trying to get to his oversized throne. To do what? Make the proclamations that define his rapidly disappearing self; he wouldn't know himself without his list of demands--demands that very few in his intimate circle have any interest in meeting just now. But let him make them. His country is already ruined, and what can his selfishness matter in the context of death? This more-than-four-century-old recalcitrant man-child, with his puppet joints and clown nose, is dying; he'll live, he has been informed, only until the end of the performance.

The King is the victim of no particular disease but time. The older of his two wives, Queen Marguerite (Susan Sarandon), anticipates his rapid deterioration with the knowing voice of a medical officer who is no stranger to death. ("Don't worry, Doctor," she says. "All his twists and turns and sidetracks . . . all to be expected, part of the program.") Her understanding of her husband is a result both of her intuition and of the years she spent with him. She can accept what the King's beloved, younger wife, Queen Marie (Lauren Ambrose), cannot: that death is life's first cousin. Queen Marie is too busy acting like a little girl--or, more accurately, acting the role of wife as little girl--to bother with the philosophical exigencies of her husband's imminent passing. She can grasp his existence only as it relates to her comfort and her image of herself.

"Exit the King" takes place, first and foremost, in a kind of jumpy, excited intellectual space--the theatre of its author's imagination. Written by the Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909-94) in 1962, the piece emerges from its author's belief in what he called "imaginative truth" in theatre; that is, a disavowal of "everyday reality." Whereas Samuel Beckett, another chief proponent of the theatre of the absurd, tried to describe meaninglessness, Ionesco aimed to deflate power for power's sake, to expose men's intellectual and emotional greed.

Brilliantly directed by Neil Armfield, "Exit the King" introduces us to the major players as they stride across the stage, waving at the audience, as if greeting the paparazzi. After fulfilling their public duty to be adored, they retreat into their home, where we catch glimpses of the characters beneath their calcified public masks. There is no pretense to naturalism. Armfield wants us to know, straight off, that the play that Ionesco wrote--lovingly and well translated for this production by Armfield and Rush--is as much about performance as anything else. Ionesco once said that plays were not literature; he meant his to be, in a sense, springboards for the actors' imaginations. The actors here, kicking aside their too long trains on a tapestry-strung stage (the thoughtful set and costumes, by Dale Ferguson, use dark hues and deep reds that bring to mind Julian Schnabel's paintings), inhabit the space as though they were simultaneously inside and outside it. They love Ionesco's language, but they know that the Master didn't want constrictive realistic readings of it. So they perform little pirouettes around his concrete poetry. Rush and Ambrose are especially astonishing at this. While Ionesco's plays have a tendency to overdescribe the action as it's happening, Ambrose and Rush convey the absurdity of talking this way, in such hyper-theatricalized speech. They're interested in exposing the rigor behind the presentation, and in deflating the ridiculous notion that we ever present a true self to the world. Still, they make the audience comfortable with this entirely unexpected Broadway fare.

Part of the pleasure of watching the show is marvelling ...