Killer

I’ve written a new version of Eugene Ionesco’s 1958 play Tueur sans gages, usually translated as The Killer, but in my version simply Killer.

In Killer, Ionesco’s hero Berenger visits a perfect city in which life has been culturally, socially and technologically perfected, in which the sun always shines, the air is fresh, the trees are lush, and the people are happy. But there is one problem. The city has a killer, an unknown individual who lures citizens away on the promise of showing them ‘the photograph of the Colonel’ and then kills them, their bodies found floating in the fountain. Berenger visits the city, falls in love with Dany, a young woman who becomes the killer’s next victim. He returns home and is visited by an old school friend who appears to have a connection to the killer and when he returns to the city, it has fallen under the sway of a rabble-rousing politician and is under martial law. Berenger continues to investigate but this draws him into the dark heart of the city and a confrontation with the killer himself.

Killer is a play I’ve been slightly obsessed with since I was a teenager. In fact I even translated the first act, for my own interest, because I’d read about it (in Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd probably) but couldn’t find a translation. Ionesco is a fascinating figure. He was enormously important and performed everywhere in the 1950s and into the 60s, but he has fallen somewhat out of favour in the years since. There have been some fairly recent revivals: Rhinoceros was done, in Crimp’s version, at the Court and, in Zinnie Harris’s version, at the Lyceum; the National did Exit the King; a while ago the RSC did Macbett.

But there is a view around, I think, that (a) he’s terribly dated and (b) he’s a bit silly. Both of these are wrong, I think. The idea that he’s dated is perhaps because he was so huge in the fifties that he’s now a bit associated with that decade and the ‘Absurdist’ moment. There is something in the humour that can seem a bit old hat, a kind of spooling logical illogicality that is a bit Goon Show (again, very fifties). In addition, Ionesco was someone very interested in stagecraft and his plays draw on the latest stage technology of the time; of course, that technology has moved on immensely, leaving some of the stage directions perhaps a bit too specific. The suggestion that the plays are silly is partly based on the Goon Show quality but also because he so caustically set himself up against Brecht and ‘committed’ theatre, in part because he saw the terrible influence of Stalin on Romania, from where his family came. But this obscures the sense in which his plays are not surreal fantasies but many of them, particularly the full-length plays from Killer onwards, deal, in their central metaphors, with social and political problems. The central image of Rhinoceros, the people of a city slowly being turned into rhinoceroses is a clear image of the rise of fascism authoritarianism, of the kind he witnessed directly in the early 40s with the coming to power in Romania of Marshal Antonescu and the fascists of the Iron Guard. This is prefigured in Killer, with its populist politician coming to power even in the heart of a perfect democracy.

Despite his reputation for wild fantasy and illegible surrealism, the central image of Killer is beautifully simple and terrifying. Ionesco originally wrote a short story ‘The Colonel’s Photograph’, published in Nouvelle Revue Française in November 1955. It follows the later play very clearly; the narrator is not named, but it begins with his visit to the city and ends, not to give spoilers, where the play ends. Ionesco is right to pursue the central image - a mysteriously alluring promise of seeing ‘the photograph of the colonel’. Again, without wanting to harshly tie the meaning down, it does not seem unreasonable to see here an image of the allure of the strong man and of militarism that leads to destruction.

In Killer, the play, Ionesco creates a protagonist, Bérénger, who will be the central figure of Rhinoceros, Exit the King, and A Walk in the Air. Here, as in Rhinoceros, Bérénger is an archetypal ‘little man’ (a bit like Havel’s later Vanek, though more innocent) who finds themselves in a strange situation through which he is our wondering and wandering guide. Here he takes us on a journey into the breathtaking light and the deep dark of mid-century European democracy.

I have adapted the play quite strongly, with the permission of the Estate. It seemed to me that the radio can do things that the stage (certainly the stage in the 1950s) could not and so the first-act tour of the Radiant City (just called Radiance in my version) is not a one-to-one encounter, but a proper vehicle tour4 with other prospective residents. I’ve separated out the Dani scenes and given them a fuller one-to-one meeting where Bérénger (Berringer in my anglicised version) buys a home. In Ionesco, Dani dies at the end of Act One, but I wanted to draw out their relationship a little further (if only a couple of hours) to ground it and make it a little more emotionally meaningful, so her end comes later. Since I’ve got Berringer buying a place, I have kept him in Radiance throughout, rather than returning him to his home outside the city walls. He’s visited by his old school friend, Edward, there and Ionesco’s play, despite being notionally a kind of thriller, only really points the finger at Edward as the killer, so I’ve tried to make a number of characters possible suspects, without pushing it too far into the genre world. Humour is very hard to translate and I’ve generally tried to find equivalent types of humour. When he returns to the Main Street of the city and comes into contact with the army, I’ve found a kind of Ortonesque tone for their debates that seems more clearly - as Orton is - rooted in a satirical vision of authority while still allowing for Ionesco’s riddling confusions. I’ve tried to make Edward’s presence a little more purposeful and allowed a sense of Berringer being under suspicion as the killer drive the action a bit more through the last act.

However, the play, famously, ends with a half-hour monologue - or rather, one-sided dialogue - in which Berringer confronts the killer and uses every possible argument to dissuade him from his murderous vocation. We had to make some cuts for time but otherwise that whole sequence is pure Ionesco.

As always, my brilliant producer/director in Polly Thomas, working with the wonderful Eloise Whitmore. Toby Jones is fantastic as Berringer with the superb Christine Bottomless as Dani. Toby Hadoke plays Edwards. (These three actors had been in my Lorenzaccio, Trains, and Dead Souls, respectively.) Other parts are played by Owen Whitelaw, Amanda Wilkin and Liz Carr.

Killer was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 7 April 2021 at 7.30pm. It is a Naked Production for the BBC.

You can listen to it below:

We were pick of the day in the Sunday Times (‘spry’?), Radio Times, and the Times. Basically all the Timeses.