Exit the King

Exit the King (French: Le Roi se meurt) is an absurdist drama by Eugène Ionesco that premiered in 1962.

Ionesco told Claude Bonnefoy [fr; ro] 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.

He was inspired partly by a childhood obsession with death in which Ionesco believed one could simply avoid being sick and live forever.

[2] According to religious historian Mircea Eliade, the play "cannot be fully understood if one does not know the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Upanishads".

According to Essif, Exit the King is Ionesco's most Beckettian play: "The image of an exterior world fades in cadence with the protagonist’s surrender to the interiority of his consciousness, that is, with the increasing intensification of his inward-turning.

In 1972 a production was brought to an abandoned castle along the Hudson River, used for the location of an independent film, directed by David Quaid and Ed Berkeley (available for free on Youtube).

Directed by Armfield, it starred Geoffrey Rush (who won a Tony Award for his performance), Susan Sarandon, William Sadler, Andrea Martin, Lauren Ambrose and Brian Hutchison.

The production also formed part of the 2007 Malthouse Theatre season in Melbourne and was one of the plays in the VCE curriculum drama students could choose to analyse.

In November 2014 the Ustinov Studio in Bath put on a production featuring Alun Armstrong, Siobhan Redmond and William Gaunt.

[9] In December 2015, the DIT Drama Society in Dublin Institute of Technology put on a production directed by Fintan Lawlor, featuring Conor Bergin and Donall Courtney.

[15] On 10 August 2023 during a season at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv a few hecklers interrupted the performance several times thinking that the play was criticising the government.