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 decades, resuscitated by every aging ham in turn. It is so much less familiar than Lear, after all, and so much more fun than Beckett’s overproduced dirges on the same topic! Richardson, Olivier, Plummer: what couldn’t they have done with the role? It’s hard to believe, though, that even any of these greats could have outdone Rush, who brings the skills not only of a first-class actor but of an equally adept mime, clown, and vaudevillian to this tragicomedy. He gives us full-blown physicality, pratfalls, strutting, and moments of apparently