Exit the King

Exit the King (French: Le Roi se meurt) is an absurdist drama by Eugène Ionesco that premiered in 1962. It is the third in Ionesco's "Berenger Cycle", preceded by The Killer (1958) and Rhinocéros (1959), and followed by A Stroll in the Air (1963).

In the other plays of the "Berenger Cycle", Berenger appears as a depressed and insecure everyman who is prone to sentimentality. In Exit the King, he is the solipsistic and belligerent King Berenger the First who was apparently at one point able to command nature and force others to obey his will. According to his first wife he is over four hundred years old. He is informed early in the play that he is dying, and the kingdom is likewise crumbling around him. He has lost the power to control his surroundings and is slowly losing his physical capabilities as well. Through much of the play, he is in denial of his death and refuses to give up power. Berenger’s first wife, Marguerite, along with the Doctor, tries to make Berenger face the reality of his impending death. Berenger’s second wife, Marie, sympathetically attempts to keep Berenger from the pain of knowing his death is imminent. The king lapses into Berenger’s normal sentimentality and eventually accepts that he is going to die. The characters disappear one by one, eventually leaving the king, now speechless, alone with Marguerite who prepares him for the end. Marguerite and then the king disappear into darkness as the play ends.

Exit the King is unusual among Ionesco’s works in that the plot is linear and focuses on depletion rather than accumulation. Often in Ionesco's plays, the stage is filled with more and more objects or characters; in Rhinoceros, for example, there are gradually more and more rhinoceroses. In this play, however, the kingdom and all the characters slowly disappear. Likewise, the language is generally more straight forward and comprehensible, eschewing Ionesco’s tendency toward abundant clichés and nonsense. Ionesco told Claude Bonnefoy in a 1966 interview that Exit the King did not "originate in a dream" as many of his plays did, but was "much more consciously composed. People immediately said: 'Oh! He’s given up the avant-garde, he’s turning classical!' It wasn’t a question of choosing between classicism and the avant-garde. I had quite simply written in a different style because I was on a different level of consciousness”.

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