Staging, pacing, and characterization choices made the absurdist play drag
Photo courtesy of the University of Victoria.
The Killing Game, the Phoenix Theatre’s latest production, is a 1970s play written by Eugène Ionesco about a plague overtaking a city. The plague comes suddenly, without warning, and is almost instantly fatal upon infection. It’s also an absurdist comedy, where most of the comedic elements are derived from the reactions of the various citizens, as all of them follow circular logic on why the plague won’t infect them — until it inevitably does. Sound familiar?
The plot of the play is conveyed through a series of vignettes, each confined to one scene.
However, the Phoenix Theatre’s direction did not do the play’s absurdist elements any favours. In fact, it dragged them down.
Some of the staging, frustratingly, had actors facing away from the audience. Combined with some poor projection on behalf of some of the actors, it made it difficult to hear exactly what was being said.
The scenes mostly ended with a ‘blue out’, when lights fade nearly to black, leaving enough light for the actors to exit the stage and stage assistants to set up the props and sets. However, this decision made the pacing drag. This method was used even if there were only two actors on stage.
The characters perform long monologues explaining why they think they won’t catch the plague. Most of the actors, however, perform said monologues as-written — with little variation in emotion or action (at least in the opening performance). The monologues themselves are clearly ‘written.’ The playwright’s hand is heavy, and they read almost like essays. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it can take audiences out of the experience if the performances read like recitals. The only times it felt like the emotion matched what the scene required was when a character either screamed for help or to their death.
This isn’t to say that there are no well-done scenes or performances. Eric Barnes, Liam James, and Jack Storwick especially stood out, as they brought the required emotions to their scenes. When dealing with an absurd situation, like your upstairs neighbours screaming for help when you have work in the morning, the circumstance demands a response of equal emotional weight. James matched the required intensity when he screamed back that he had work in the morning and to be quiet.
One especially effective scene saw two couples reunite, playing in parallel on the stage, only to end every differently. Another was a prison scene, which made clever use of props to render the scene’s dark ending truly haunting.
But perhaps the most frustrating part of The Killing Game were the glaring winks to the audience. I shouldn’t have to explain why a story about a plague — and various reactions to it — is especially relevant in the year 2025. But this production went out of its way to hammer the play’s relevancy. One character, for example, commented that a heat wave was making the plague worse, after which the actors stared at the audience for approximately too long.
The worst wink to the audience came when a conman, with promises that the city council was behind the plague, led the citizens to storm city hall, chanting “drain the swamp”. The audience had been laughing at the conman’s speech before this, able to make the connection to the present just fine on their own.
The Killing Game was, ultimately, a disappointment with a few standout scenes. The pacing was slow, and by the time the second act arrived, the scenes were less an experiment in circular logic, and more waiting for bodies to start dropping — signalling the end of a lengthy monologue.
