Exit The King
by Eugene Ionesco,
translated by Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush
Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King became one of the most personal design journeys of my MFA years — a deep dive into absurdity, mortality, and the fragile architecture of a human mind nearing its final collapse. From the beginning, I was fascinated by how the play compresses time, place, and action into one isolated environment. That allowed me to create a world that doesn’t just contain the story — it is the King’s psyche: an enormous, cold, cracked interior where everything is shrinking, decaying, and slipping into inevitable disappearance. The oversized concrete tiles, the vanishing depth, the suspended cube of “death,” and the collapsing entrances all emerged from this tension between power and helplessness, imagination and oblivion.
The characters became fragments of the King’s identity, collaged together from found objects — part asylum patient, part monarch, part memory that refuses to dissolve. Designing all visual elements allowed me to build a single unified language for this world: costumes that grow or diminish with the body’s failure, props disguised as medical equipment, and light that shifts from sterile institutional reality to a painterly, transcendent final moment. Even through radical changes and challenges in the rehearsal process, the design remained devoted to one idea: that we are watching a man learn how to die — surrounded by the last pieces of himself.
This production pushed my craft technically and emotionally. It asked me to trust my instincts, negotiate collaboration under pressure, and hold onto the core of a concept while letting it evolve. Exit the King is absurd, yes — but for me, designing it was an act of clarity: building a space where fear, humor, and beauty coexist, right up to the final breath.
CREDITS:
Cast
King Berenger — Ian Leung*
Queen Marguerite — Beth Graham*
Queen Marie — Lauren Hughes
The Doctor — Sparky Johnson*
Juliette — Meegan Sweet
The Guard — Michael Anderson
Creative Team
Director — Kevin Sutley*
Set, Costume & Lighting Designer — Reza Basirzadeh**
Sound Designer — Matthew Skopyk
Set & Lighting Design Assistant — Beyata Hackborn
Assistant Director — Mukonzi Musyoki
Assistants to Director — Sammy Lowe, Racquel Deveau, Tonya Rae Chrystian
Stage Management
Stage Manager — Linda Mullen
Assistant Stage Managers — Andrea Handal, Jennie Emms
Faculty Advisors
Stage Management Advisor — John Raymond
Design Advisor — Lee Livingstone
* Participation arranged by permission of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association
** In partial fulfillment of MFA Theatre Design thesis
Venue:
Timms Centre for the Arts, University of Alberta,
May 2018
