In the way one can only really enjoy an apple from the cart by stealing it - not by degrading the acquisition with a buck, I would evidence my wonder by citing (emphasis added) without permission, a review of EXIT THE KING by Hilton Als from the New Yorker, the review so close to perfection that I feel I have been waiting years and years for his expression:“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 Eugène 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 that it made it to Broadway at all. But placing this delicate world of ideas alongside the musicals and canned dramas of the boulevard is exactly the kind of thing that Ionesco loved to do: upset our traditional notions of theatre and remind us of the difficult and joyful process of suspending disbelief. The joke for Ionesco, Armfield, and the actors is that they know their world is artificial. What’s real is their attempt to convince us otherwise."
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 that it made it to Broadway at all. But placing this delicate world of ideas alongside the musicals and canned dramas of the boulevard is exactly the kind of thing that Ionesco loved to do: upset our traditional notions of theatre and remind us of the difficult and joyful process of suspending disbelief. The joke for Ionesco, Armfield, and the actors is that they know their world is artificial. What’s real is their attempt to convince us otherwise."
No comments:
Post a Comment