Neil Armfield: Tailoring Exit the King for the Great White Way
As co-founder and artistic director of Company B, one of Sydney’s premiere theater companies, Neil Armfield has become a leading force in Australian theater. In addition to countless plays, he’s directed operas the world over, as well as television and feature films such as 2006’s Candy, which he also wrote, starring the late Heath Ledger. Yet Armfield had never worked on Broadway until this season, when his revival of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, starring Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in March. Based on a new translation Armfield wrote with Rush, the production earned glowing reviews from both critics and theater buffs who were happy to see the work of a French absurdist like Ionesco back in Times Square. Broadway.com asked Armfield to share the story of how Exit the King came to be, and why a play about a king's slow march toward death inspired two lads who just wanted to clown around.
Geoffrey Rush and I first met in Sydney back in 1980, just when my professional career was getting started. He’d already made a significant mark for himself, thanks to several productions up in Queensland, and the first play we did together was David Hare’s Teeth ‘N’ Smiles. We became very close friends and colleagues over the years, collaborating on five shows in a row in South Australia, including Twelfth Night, which we also made a film of. Along the way, I developed and became artistic director for Company B, a theater company in Sydney that’s grown around my relationship with a number of key actors—of which Geoffrey is certainly one.
In 1989, we did a production of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, working from a new translation, and realized we shared a sensibility and an ear for text. We also discovered this offbeat repertoire of classics that Geoffrey, with his great physical skills and comedic sense and immense emotional power, could really make a new mark on. So we took Madman to Russia in 1991, toured Australia a couple of times, mounted productions of Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist—all the while developing a certain physical and verbal language for the kind of clowning that interested us both. Then Geoffrey read Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King. Baffled over how the play had gathered dust and gotten lost in academia, he knew it would be a knockout onstage. It’s certainly unlike any piece of theater that I’ve done, or even know.
Just as we had done with The Marriage of Figaro a number of years ago, we commissioned an English translation of Exit the King—as literal as possible, word by word. The result doesn’t make grammatical sense, necessarily, but allows you to see the structure of the original. Toward the end of the 2006, we sat for a couple of months with our translation, Ionesco’s original French script, a few dictionaries, our own knowledge of French and a sense of where this play might go, and we worked up our adaptation.
We wanted to make the play alive and fresh. Not smart-assed and modern, but as punchy and as vivid as we felt Ionesco was being in 1962, when he wrote it. There were a number of untranslatable sexual puns that we had to find equivalents for, or twist a little bit to convey the innuendo. Like when the Guard talks of the castle’s deterioration and says, “I’ve been filling up the crack with Juliette.” Or when Queen Marie says, “New stars are being born, virgin stars,” and the king barks, “Fuck the virgin stars!” The moment’s definitely a sexual explosion in the original French text. We just had to find our own version of it, and hopefully get a laugh, if not more.
When we started rehearsals in New York, we handed out French dictionaries and copies of the French script, and opened up the text up again. Lauren Ambrose, in particular, was interested in going back to the French, and we reinstated some things we’d cut from the Queen Marie role. Andrea Martin did her own sifting, as well. When Juliette, her character, hears Queen Marguerite tell the King, “You called me a boring old cow,” we originally had Juliet deadpan, “Got it in one,” which is more meaningful in Australia. During previews, Andrea tried something different almost every night, lines like “Bingo” and “You said it,” before she found the one she was getting the best laugh on: “Close enough!”
We even reinstated lines that Ionesco himself had cut. There’s a whole sequence when the king seems to be dead and everyone eulogizes him, saying he “chopped off a few heads. Not that many. It was for national security.” It seemed like a useful line to have in a country where many states have the death penalty.
One part in particular has convinced some people that we intentionally made the script contemporary: When the King says, “Marguerite, a palace without a washing machine?” And she replies, “We had to pawn it for the treasury bailout.” That’s very meaningful in America, obviously. But Ionesco wrote it as, “We had to pawn it for a state loan.” Which implies exactly the same thing—that the state has run into trouble financially and the ruling family has to do some stripping of their assets in order to bail out the bank. It’s all there in the original!
Back when we opened in Sydney, there was interest in remounting the production from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Geoffrey and I told Cate Blanchett we wanted to go to Broadway. “No!” she insisted. “Broadway’s so conservative. They’ll devour you.” After we opened at the Barrymore Theatre, the review in The New Yorker remarked how “the miracle of this production is that it’s on Broadway at all.”
So to play a Broadway house, and have audiences sit in hysteria, has been one of the great satisfactions of bringing Exit the King to New York. A number of people have come up to me and said, “We just don’t see this kind of theater,” so it’s been immensely gratifying to finally present a style, which Geoffrey and I have been developing for almost 20 years, to some of the most sophisticated theatergoers in the world.