Exit the King - RNT

IMO it's because people mostly use Twitter under their real names. Apart from trolls and suchlike but I guess Twitter trolls generally take little interest in surrealist theatre. I use Twitter frequently and I wouldn't tweet negatively about a play (I wouldn't post about this play under my real name).

I notice they haven't even sold out press night.

Some whoops last night at curtain call so at best they can hope for a Marmite production. Unless friends of cast?

Or maybe people just have different tastes 

In shows they see

and we should respect people have different opinions 

(also its easy sitting behind a screen name spewing hate and comments no one takes seriously)

I don’t want to start an argument but just because it’s a show that some people have disliked a lot, it shouldnt make the people who have liked feel stupid and you shouldn’t shame them for what they wear or are like a as people, the wonderful thing about theatre or any art form is that we all interpret it and review it differently and should just respect other people views and not spew our own ones as being right.Didn’t your mother ever teach you that maybe if you don’t have anything nice to say   Don’t say anything at all.

The sort of tweet I’d move past quickly, it doesn’t give an idea of what the production is (visually, thematically etc.) just their own feelings. The comment about panto is potentially interesting but, out of the context of other comments, it leads to nothing. As here, an jndividual post can be as misleading as an individual tweet, facebook post or whatever.

Did anyone see The Chairs with Richard Briers and Geraldine McEwan? Apart from Godot it’s the last absurdist success I can remember in the West End, must be twenty years ago. Rhinoceros is good but difficult to stage well for obvious reasons. Whenever we get a classic absurdist or expressionist play nowadays I see people slagging off the writing, do the plays not mean anything today? Are we too used to realism? Can actors act them? I thought
Machinal was let down by some pedestrian acting, for example, it needs more extremes, greater caricatures, at times it felt like I was watching Ibsen (for me, that’s not a good thing!)

This particular play was a recent success in the studio at Bath with Alun Armstrong. It is also the sort of classic revival the NT Should be doing. However putting it in the Olivier with an inept director creates insurmountable problems. It should be in the Dorfman but their arbitrary policy of only putting new plays in there means that isn’t allowed.

Pity? I don’t think it’s being advertised as in any way experimental thiugh. If that’s one, what was the other one? 

Form, and experimentation with it, is most definitely what audiences are challenged by. The Writer, which I loved, did so with intelligence and meaning. The Octoroon, which I only caught recently and have not yet written about, was also dazzling in its playing with form, I thought. Probably my two highlights of the year so far.

Naturalism isn’t patriarchal although feminist and BAME writing has often fallen down, for me, because it stuck to the familiar tropes of realism. The Writer and The Octoroon were both so successful, I thought, because they critiqued existing styles within a framework of deconstructing them.

The world is in chaos and what exists may well need ‘blowing up’, usually theatre follows what happens in the world. Expressionism reacting to the carnage and nightmare in the early twentieth century, for example, absurdism to the atom bomb and its destruction. This play tells of the disintegration of society, isn’t that what many people find we are living through? I imagine that is the reason here. We do need new forms, always, and realism can only reflect a relatively narrow range of responses.

I wandered into this thread as I was over on the NT website contemplating booking it. As ever a delight to find among the genuine commentary and discussion, the idea that people liking a production or not is a stamp of their intelligence (or let's face, the underlying commentary: class).

So I guess a thick old working class gal like me would love it then?

I didn't book for this - and don't plan to.

Bad comments aside - I was taken to see a production of it in French when I was a university. Grim.

You tasted it? OMGosh, @parsley is the living, breathing reincarnation of the late, great Divine back on earth to guide us in the excesses of bad taste. Who'd have thought it?

You think you're a man but you're only a boy...

Why so defensive? I was just interested in what you’d seen (last week I saw The Octoroon, Machinal, Fun Home and Heathers, this week it’s The Lehman Trilogy, Allelujah and Home, I’m Darling. Hopefully I’ll get around to writing about a few of them some time soon).

Ryan, how about a stage version of Pink Flamingos? Great for a family night out.

I've been thinking more about this, having read the past few pages.
I love avant garde and absurdist or surrealist theatre. I adored the Writer, an Octoroon, Pomona, and going back a bit plays like Rhinoceros, Marat/Sade, and certainly Waiting for Godot. Some of my favourite plays are considered 'theatre of the absurd' classics.

The problem with this production is that it didn't feel especially absurdist or avant garde. You could cut about ten minutes and turn it into a straight drama about a patriarch of a family being told he's terminally ill and working through the stages of grief. It doesn't work as a drama because the characters were so weakly drawn you're not invested in them, but it doesn't work as an absurdist piece because those elements are so underplayed. It's mainly an hour and a half of a guy wailing that he's going to die.

Rhys' spitting power though, wow.