"The King Dies"

About this event

The King Dies, in addition to fitting into the medieval tradition of the danse macabre ("dance of death"), is the only play in world literature devoted entirely to the act of dying itself. In this sense, it represents a stage image, characteristic of Ionesco's early work. The duration of the performance - determined to the minute from the very beginning - coincides with the duration of the dying man's agony. The poetic core of this work is that the man-king Beranger is both the first and the last - a king in the same degree that each of us is the ruler of his own life, first and last on the throne of his own existence. And with each person in the grave sinks an entire empire. Human vulnerability, fragility and helplessness - mortality itself - can go beyond the limits of the tragic grotesque or the absurd funny only if we keep the hope of salvation and believe in the Resurrection.