Exit the King

June 14th 2007 12:00 am | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

The King is Dead, Long Live the King - a brilliant Geoffrey Rush returns to the Sydney stage.

Exit the King

In 1962, when Eugene Ionesco wrote Exit the King, the western world was poised between old and new, fear and adventure, the Swinging 60s and the Cold War. John F Kennedy was president of the United States and star of a revived dream of Camelot. The first communications satellite - Telstar - was launched; West Side Story won the best picture Oscar and the Beatles were recording and re-recording Love Me Do, Please Please Me and PS I Love You.

At the same time, World War II was a vividly recent reality for millions, so such discombobulating events as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the creation of the miniskirt contributed to a sense of absurdity and alarm which - for the playwright - coalesced in what is now known as Theatre of the Absurd.

Watching, fascinated, from within the somnolent white picket fence world of Robert Menzies' Australia were two boys: Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush. Living in equal measures of security and boredom, their fertile minds were perfect repositories for the seeds of creativity to lie dormant until a new Age of Absurdity. The result is a peculiarly potent creative partnership in which the Clown and the Intellect (in both men) have combined to produce some of the most memorable theatre of the past 20 years, from Diary of a Madman onwards.

Absurdist theatre therefore - The Chairs and The Goat - are recent productions that spring to mind - is the obvious form at our moment in history. It is difficult to imagine much more absurd than this first decade of the 21st century, dominated as it is by The War on Turr, catastrophic climate change and Paris Hilton's various epiphanies.

Exit the King As an actor whose spiritual home is the Belvoir St stage, Geoffrey Rush's inspired grasp on absurdity and reality, the cerebral and the physical, was made for the role of King. This is a man - or an idea - so puffed with hubris that he cannot believe death will disobey his orders, yet he can also say, with heart stopping sweetness, "One cannot live badly, it is a contradiction in terms."

Rush is joined in Exit the King by Julie Forsythe, another actor who shares his sensibility and extraordinary gifts for childlike innocence and bloodcurdling wickedness. An apparent absence of self-consciousness makes these two able to produce a combination of unique physical humour and a marvellous depth of character which is exhilarating to watch. As Juliette, the long-suffering maid and general factotum, Forsythe contributes immeasurably to the play and, in a long scene with Rush, the pair produces a sequence of sheer genius.

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