The New Criterion
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TheaterMay 2009 The end of the line by Brooke Allen On Exit the King, Happiness, Our Town & God of Carnage. Aging actors, longing to showcase skills they have spent a lifetime perfecting, are often obliged to dig deep for suitable and interesting projects. After all, there are relatively few plays that provide starring roles for older men, and New York can only handle so many Lears per decade. In his search for an interesting new role, Geoffrey Rush has turned up a forgotten masterpiece, for which he is magnificently suited: Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King, first performed in France in 1962 and subsequently produced in England with Alec Guinness in the title role. Its only Broadway outing to date was in 1968, when the Phoenix Theater launched it in repertory for a season. Seeing what the grandly outrageous Mr. Rush has been able to do with this absurdist tale of an absolute monarch being forced to confront his own death makes me wonder why it has not been a Broadway and West End staple for ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 May 2009, on page 37 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-end-of-the-line-4081
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