Exit The King

Written by Eugene Ionesco

Directed by Neil Blackadder

King Berenger has ruled for four centuries, but even monarchs are not immortal. “You are going to die in an hour and a half,” one of his two wives tells him, “You’re going to die at the end of this show.” Berenger’s resistance to this announcement provides the starting-point for Exit the King, Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 philosophical comedy about human beings’ relationships to living and dying. Ionesco is one of the key figures of the so-called “absurdist” theatre, a movement that evolved in the 1950s in France when he, Samuel Beckett, and others began to dispense with almost all the conventional features of dramatic writing and instead explored existential issues through implausible yet resonant theatrical images. Exit the King will thus provide the Knox students and faculty with the opportunity to explore an important strand of theatre history and to create a universe at once fantastical and recognizable.