Requiem For A King

Journal 32; April 8, 2009

We all have to die. Some of us spend our entire lives dying. Some wait like eager patients for the clinical diagnosis of whatever it will be that will kill us, in order to save the pain of the unknown. Some fear death, the unknown, because they don’t want to die. And some of us, a happy few, get to die onstage, over and over again.

Exit the King, written by Eugene Ionesco, tells the story of the death of a King Berenger (Geoffrey Rush), four-hundred years old and still as stubborn and ornery as he was three-hundred and eighty years ago. Surrounded by his crumbling kingdom, Berenger must come to terms with death through a series of satirical, absurdist looks at humanity, represented by his dwindling court.

In The Guard (Brian Hutchinson), we see the most docile and obvious forms of our emotion, a knight of sheer power and booming voice, paradoxically trapped inside his own suit of armor. Throughout the play The Guard stands proud and defiant, though of course he is moderately helpless and completely useless: there is no kingdom left to guard anymore, no bandits to defeat. In his pitying speeches about how great the King Berenger we see that lost power of masculinity, that supposition of real strength for the appearance of it, declaring things that don’t need declaring (“The King has made dying illegal”) in order to keep something, some power over death. But, like Berenger, The Guard is a reflection of the dumb futility of swords in a world without wars, of a man wearing a suit of armor to protect him from old age.

In Queen Marguerite (Susan Sarandon) and Queen Marie (Lauren Ambrose) we see both sides of the two-headed coin, optimism and pessimism personified. Queen Marie tries to keep Berenger from dying with supplications of his own vitality, of the things he used to do that were grand and wonderful, his feats and great feasts. In her wake we see how youth refuses understanding of death, and her permanent tears written in black mascara on her face don’t show acceptance but the worst kind of refusal, a childish notion of total denial. Queen Marguerite on the other hand performs the role of Charon, the ferryman on the River to the Underworld at the end of the play, and it seems as though her presence exists for only that reason from her first moments on the play. Her job is not to make death any easier, but she stands as facilitation of the truth of death. She says plainly that death will happen and that there is no way to avoid it. Neither one of these women can really show Berenger how to die, for one exists only for life and the other exists only for death; neither of them can come as close as Berenger can to the boundary between the two.

In the smaller (though no less great) roles of Juliette and The Doctor I think I see a bit of the real world. With a lot of the characters in complete denial and caught up in the world of philosophical thought as opposed to practicality, it is the maid and the physician who point to the effects of death on the outside world, the freezing of the sun, the drying up of the marshes and the rumbling of the starving stomach. For the maid Berenger’s death has real implications—she will lose her purpose if he dies. In the same way The Doctor doesn’t know if he could go on without Berenger. In the name of the King the Doctor has committed horrible atrocities, and without the symbol of near-omnipresent power he will just be another genocidist without a holy edict to point to for absolution. For these two the question is not how will King Berenger learn to die but how can the world go on without him?

The absurdist nature of the play lends itself to this intense talk of death without seeming melodramatic. There is the humor of getting old present, the weak-knees and the loss of color in the hair, the loss of memory and the infantile placations necessary by those that love us. But when this play is dramatic it is dramatic. Berenger wanders the aisles, speaking to the dead that have already come before, wanting and waiting for something to show him how to die happy, proud, powerful, with pride and with solemn acceptance, but in our refusal to answer he receives nothing. Like an old man, the people in his life disappear in a puff of smoke, and we are left with the image of a dying man trying to envision the passage to a new world, something not even we are allowed to see.

Maybe death is like this, long and drawn out, but filled with the events that tell us what we leave behind. Finally, we have no more time, and it is that above all things that keeps us moving forward, the wish to stay as long as possible, to get the most out of every moment. But one can’t spend one’s life counting down, even if one is in a play. We have the our friends to do that for us.

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