Exit the king: No exit for the audience

“Much ado about nothing,” says Queen Marguerite to King Berenger at the end of the play when he finally takes his last breath. And that summarizes ‘Exit the King’, a play directed by Eelum Dixit being staged at the Kamalmani Theater in Rato Bangla School, Patan.



Lengthy dialogues and incomprehensible roles of the characters in the play provide little respite for the audience. [break]



‘We have had too much of the king’, is what pops into the audience’s mind. Eugene Ionesco, one of the greats of absurd theater, may have written it but the message of the play hardly gets across and it feels like watching a bad school play.



Mita Hosali as Queen Marguerite and Eelum Dixit as King Berenger do justice to their roles in some way but the others are just lost. Gunjan Dixit who enacts Juliette is scratching her head at odd times and Pragyan Thapa Ghimire as the guard has an unnatural barking voice. Veda Khadka or Queen Marie moans through most of her dialogues. The doctor in the play or Ruby Karki is an unfitting character. She’s dressed in the avatar of a vamp and minces her words.







The props are glittery; the stage is huge but the audience on Sunday night was few and the acting was worse off. Among the 20 or so scattered individuals in the hall, the only ones who seemed to be enjoying the play were children. Each time the king fell while trying to balance on his cane, they laughed.



Besides their occasional outbursts and giggles the play moves like a monologue. It’s lost in its own perfect world, alien to the audience. Theater group Nepal Shakes needs to step up a notch before staging the play again.

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