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The Killing Game - a comedy by Eugène Ionesco

There are no preliminary symptoms. The autopsies have revealed nothing. Science is helpless...

No one is safe when 'the sickness' begins to invade. Community leaders struggle to maintain control while paranoia and panic spread through the population. 

As chaos ensues one thought remains - we can't all die...can we?

Presented by First-Year Theatre Students

Directed by Helen Trenos

Season and ticket details:

The Annexe Theatre, Inveresk, Launceston 7250.

Four shows only, 23-26 September at 7pm. 

Tickets - $10

Free for Bachelor of Contemporary Arts students and TCotA staff.

Door sales available or for bookings: 63244450 

Monday - Thursday: 9am - 4pm.

Come and seal your fate.

Notes from the Director…

‘death is, of course, not always unwelcome in the stage space. We frequently see it enacted. It is the traditional ending to many dramas: obligatory in tragedy. The audience comes to see blood spilt, to witness the rituals of death, with the proviso that the actor will in a moment spring up and take a bow’ (Ward 2010, p. 142).

Actors love to die on stage. Not in the metaphorical sense of performing badly, but in enacting their characters’ deaths: the last gasps, screams, death rattles, the frail arms extended to loved ones, the famous last words. The First-Year Theatre students of 2015 are, therefore, in their element because there is a lot of dying in Ionesco’s The Killing Game: 95 characters and each one of them dies. Those that don’t suddenly drop dead from the mysterious ‘plague’ wracking their city die of other causes: murder, suicide, loneliness, grief, despair. Whatever the cause, death is imminent, mechanical, and, grotesquely, a form of light relief. In fact, the play’s French title—Jeux de Massacre—is derived from the sideshow game where punters try to knock down as many human-like dolls as they can.

With death comes corpses, and in The Killing Game, there is a proliferation of corpses. This is vintage Ionesco: what Esslin describes as the ‘horror of proliferation—the invasion of the stage by evergrowing masses of people or things’ (Esslin 2001, p.150). The corpses that litter the stage—simultaneously comic, grotesque and tragic—force the characters (and we, the audience) to acknowledge the ever-presence of death, to question what it means to face and experience death; to face Ionesco’s provocation: that ‘failing to face the issue of death’, we ‘are not fully alive’ (Esslin 2001, p. 193).

I would like to congratulate the First-Year Theatre Students. In tackling The Killing Game, they demonstrated remarkable esprit de corps. Their work off and on stage—supèrbe!

- Helen Trenos

References:

Esslin, M 2001, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd edn, Methuen, London.

Ward, N 2010, ‘The Death of the Actor’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 140-147.