QUONTA Festival 2018 # 4: The Abdication Crisis

The  QUONTA Drama Region's annual festival brings together

community theatre productions from across northeastern Ontario

in a week of staging, discussing, learning about, and living

the art of theatre.  This year there are four productions entered.

I have neither read nor seen any of these plays on stage, so 
I am coming in cold to each performance as pure audience.

Exit the King 

by Eugene Ionesco
translated by Donald Wilson

Presented by Gore Bay Theatre
Directed by Andrea Emmerton and Walter Maskel

This is the only play of the Festival which was not originally written in English.  This raises the possibility (albeit a small one) that the translator's own personal lens of experience has significantly altered the author's original intent.  In practice, this is usually a much bigger concern when a play is identified as "adapted," a term with considerably broader implications than "translated."

Exit the King is loosely described as an absurdist play.  So it is in part.  But it gradually proceeds to a sparer, more stripped-down worldview in which the nature of life and death, or at least the process of dying, becomes the central, the only concern.  The six characters who together examine this worldview began as symbols, almost as caricatures.  What was so fascinating to me was the way that each one in turn helped the King to dig deeper under the layers of artifice that made up his "role", and so to find his true humanity as he faced the only truly universal human experience -- death.

This production presented a fully unified interpretation of Ionesco's strange world, where a king lives for 450 years and his pre-determined time of passing is signalled and accompanied by earthquakes, rising sea levels, cracks in the walls, and other signs and portents.

The palace throne room was delineated by various tapestries and hangings, all dingy, many threadbare, and several partially ripped apart.  The thrones, once their gorgeous coloured draperies were removed, proved to be an ordinary stool and a 50s-vintage kitchen chair.

Costumes were an intriguing mix of style and schtick.  The guard, the nurse/domestic, and the doctor/executioner/bacteriologist/astrologist appeared in costumes that were jokey or cartoonish in nature, from the guard's cardboard-seeming armour to the doctor's tall pointed wizard's hat.  At the opposite extreme came the regal fuchsia-coloured gown and turban-like hat of Queen Marguerite and the golden robes and elaborately frilly crown of Queen Marie.  The King joined the two extremes with his classic purple velvet cloak draped around blue striped pyjamas.

Lighting and sound were very much at the service of the production, not mere ends in themselves as can sometimes seem to be the case.  The combination of the anarchic purpose-composed music with the flickering lights neatly highlighted the frequent earthquakes.

The cartoonish nature of the costumes was reflected in the performances of the three most absurd characters.  As The Guard, Jack Clark scored repeatedly with his stentorian announcements of everything from the latest medical bulletin to the last emotional state of the crying Marie.  Lori Evans gave a delightfully stodgy performance as the domestic help and registered nurse, with the stodge fitting the character to perfection.  I especially loved her insistence on using the term "sitting room."  John Robertson brought a pompous, self-aware delight to his every action, and especially to his repeated "business" with the stethoscope when the King repeatedly collapsed and then revived several times in succession.

The real power of this 105-minute single act came from the performances of the remaining three actors.  John Hawke gave a multi-faceted portrayal of King Berenger the First, ranging from his petulant refusal to acknowledge the reality at the beginning to his final acceptance of the reality of death towards the end.  Physicality and voice alike charted the long decline from health through illness to decrepitude.  His was a deeply moving journey towards enlightenment by acceptance.

As the second wife, Queen Marie, Tara Bernatchez began with cartoonish crying on the turn of a dime, and grew slowly into a deeply human and increasingly desperate attempt to save the King from his demise.  As she in turn realized that her power over the King was ebbing away, I truly pitied her in her loss.

Shannon McMullan centred and anchored the play with her granite portrayal of the first wife, Queen Marguerite -- the orchestrator of this entire extended death scene.  It is she who recognizes the signs and tells the King that he will die at the end of the play, in an hour and forty-five minutes.  It is she who scorns the warmly emotional appeals of Marie.  It is she who continually checks the remaining time with the doctor, determining that there is still enough time to complete the ritual.

After all the others, one by one, disappear, it is Marguerite -- now arriving at a softer, more maternal, almost consoling persona -- who helps the King to lay aside, one by one, all the burdens that have beset him through his life, and it is she who helps and supports him as he takes the final steps.  Throughout the entire play, McMullan remained a formidable presence on stage, even when sitting still and silent.

That final scene, movingly accompanied by gentle music, brought the fulfilment towards which the entire play had travelled, and it brought tears to my eyes with it.

It also brought the one technical issue which I noted, as the music came up a little too strongly and made it hard to hear Marguerite's words.  From what I did hear, her final speeches are a beautiful and poetic utterance that deserves to be fully audible.

But that's a minor quibble.  Overall, this remains one of the most moving and powerful plays that I have seen in a Festival production for many a year.

Some of this year's awards are, I think, already bespoken.