El rey se muere Ionesco by Atalaya, with Carmen Gallardo as the king
All the information
About the event
Atalaya, Ricardo Iniesta's Seville company, brings to the Teatro Góngora Ionesco's play (Exit the King) about a king who knows he will die at the end of the performance, with Carmen Gallardo as Berenger.
Key points
- Friday 4 December at the Teatro Góngora
- At 8 pm, tickets from 17 to 21 euros
- Directed by Ricardo Iniesta and Sario Téllez
- Carmen Gallardo plays King Berenger
A king nobody obeys
Berenger goes on giving orders to his whole world while everything around him falls apart: nobody obeys any more, neither human beings nor things. He is an authoritarian, egocentric king who refuses to accept fate, or to admit that fate is the true ruler of the universe and far more powerful than he is. He is told that he will die at the end of the show; he has only an hour and a half to live. Eugène Ionesco, one of the great names of the theatre of the absurd, wrote the play in 1962 and reflects in it on death, the passing of time and the human condition.
Atalaya's reading
In Atalaya's version, Berenger represents the whole of humanity in a twilight, apocalyptic situation: the time when man made himself king of the Earth has passed because he himself has led it to destruction. It is the drama of man as an individual, but also as a society, a society in decline that receives ever more frequent and intense signals from nature and chooses not to listen to them, not to see them and not to act in time. Ricardo Iniesta and Sario Téllez direct, and the adaptation is by Iniesta himself, founder of this Seville company with more than four decades of history and winner of the Premio Nacional de Teatro.
A cast from the company's own ranks
King Berenger is played by Carmen Gallardo, Atalaya's leading actress, in a change of the character's gender that the company takes in its stride. Marga Reyes is Queen Marguerite and Silvia Garzón is Queen Marie; Aurora Bas plays Juliette, the nurse; Jerónimo Arenal, the doctor and astrologer, and Manuel Asensio, the guard. It is the company's regular cast, a stable ensemble that works with Atalaya's own stage language: choral acting, live music and a very carefully crafted visual aesthetic, in which the classic text becomes a contemporary experience. The municipal listing gives neither a running time nor a recommended age.
Date and tickets
The performance is on Friday 4 December at the Teatro Góngora, on Calle Jesús María, in the centre of Córdoba, as part of the programme of the IMAE, the Instituto Municipal de Artes Escénicas. It starts at 8 pm and tickets cost between 17 and 21 euros, on sale at teatrocordoba.es and at the Teatro Góngora box office; you can also check the website or call the theatre before booking your evening. The production comes from touring Andalusian theatres such as the Alhambra in Granada and the Cánovas in Málaga, and tends to sell out in the places where Atalaya has a loyal audience, so it is worth keeping an eye out for when sales open.
