Exit the King

Exit the King — apart from the medieval danse macabre tradition — is the only play in world literature that is entirely about the act of dying, and in this sense it is an image, much like Ionesco’s early works. Its stage time — defined with minute-level precision right at the outset — is exactly as long as a man’s death agony takes. The poetic core of this image is that this man-king, Bérenger, is both the first and the last: as much a king as any of us, first and last on the throne of our own lives, and with each of us an entire empire descends into the grave. Human vulnerability, frailty, and helplessness — mortality itself — can only step out of the realm of the tragically grotesque or the ridiculously absurd if we hold on to the hope of redemption and believe in resurrection.