WHILE he’s been known as a stage animal for decades in his native Australia, Geoffrey Rush is only now making his Broadway debut. Based on his performance in “Exit the King,” a major injustice has finally been rectified.
Were he a Brit instead of an Aussie, New York theatergoers would rave over Rush instead of Simon Russell Beale or Ian Mc-
Kellen. And we’d probably have seen him in something like “Macbeth” or “Uncle Vanya” by now.
Happily, we don’t have to endure yet another production of these overroasted chestnuts to discover the actor. Instead, Rush carries a 1962 play by Eugéne Ionesco, who may be a master of the absurd, along with Beckett, but is rarely seen on Broadway.
The tragicomic “Exit the King” is a chronicle of a death foretold. “You are going to die in an hour and a half,” King Berenger (Rush) is informed by his first wife, Queen Marguerite (Susan Sarandon). “You are going to die at the end of the play.”
And so he does, in what is possibly the longest, oddest, funniest agony in the history of the theater.
Though he’s at least 400 years old, Berenger refuses to kick the bucket. And why shouldn’t he? He still looks good dragging his mink train, lives in a slightly shabby but still comfy palace straight out of ABC Carpet & Home, has a babelicious second wife (Lauren Ambrose), and reigns over the elements
themselves.
Alas, resistance is futile.
You may see the pajama-clad king’s delusions as a represention of our own inability to face mortality, or it could be an allegory for the crumbling of the American Empire. The malleability of Ionesco’s text allows for as many interpretations as there are viewers, and this openness feels exhilarating.
Guiding us through denial, resignation and the childish senility that precedes the ultimate oblivion, Rush is never less than virtuosic without lapsing into showboating. In the first act, for instance, he rolls a craggy Lear, a cocky man-child and a capricious master of the universe into one increasingly decrepit package.
His Berenger is at once theatrically stylized and all too human. It’s a delicate balance, and one the rest of Neil Armfield’s production doesn’t nail quite as precisely.
Partly it’s due to Armfield’s timidity — he just doesn’t go far enough with the second act’s metaphysical chaos — and partly to some of the actors’ difficulty with suggesting ambiguity.
Ambrose is her usual lovely self but doesn’t bring much shading to an admittedly thin role, while Andrea Martin’s one-note vaudevillian shtick is funny in some scenes, tiresome in others.
More problematic is Sarandon, who barks out her lines as if unsure whether she’s meant to be authoritative or just in a bad mood. Only in her lengthy final monologue does she miraculously come to life with a sense of genuine poetic tragedy.
That ending is particularly tricky, because Marguerite essentially holds Berenger’s hand as he stares at death, and the universe ultimately disappears with him. But when nothingness wins over being, the most literal blackout of the season becomes one of the most exciting.