On this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as
possible, not to join forces with the pestilences,” says the itinerant Tarrou, in Albert
Camus’ The Plague. Written 23 years later, Eugene Ionesco’s The Killing Game
(or Here Comes a Chopper) is a play about a town in the grip of its own “scourge”.
Like Camus’ Oran, the true scourge of this small city are the obsessions of its
populace, its rulers and the underclass, its brutality and ignorance.
Here Comes a Chopper is among Ionesco’s less frequently produced plays, making
it a bold choice for Newbury’s New Era Players, who present the darkly satirical
piece with a macabre revelry.
Structured as a series of skits and sketches, the play has no clear continuous
protagonists, providing significant challenges for director Lisa Harrington and her
excellent cast, who manage to keep their audience transfixed from one absurd set
piece to another.
An ensemble in the truest sense, the cast of 12 succeed in presenting what appear
to be hundreds of characters across the two acts, as we follow the townsfolk through
several months of lockdown. There are naysayers and government calls for calm,
the nonsensical application of statistics in the search for meaning, there’s paranoia,
fear, unreasonable reason, and eventually all-out anarchy.
Presented five years after our own ‘plague’ of Covid, the similarities are obvious,
which of course serves to only give the satirical content more relevance and bite.
However, the cast do well to let those moments land with levity, avoiding the urge to
heavy-handedly point out the parallels.
The slapstick is well balanced with a handful of genuinely touching moments,
beautifully performed by more experienced members of the cast. This adds much
needed emotional weight to the piece, and it is testament to the cast, that we are so
emotionally invested.
On the surface, Here Comes a Chopper appears to be a ridiculous comedy about a
town of simpletons, but New Era have expertly found the heart and soul of this
absurdist work, exposing human frailty, ignorance and corruption where we should
be finding connection and compassion.
Ionesco was deeply affected by his experiences in France during the Second World
War. He was friends with Breton and the Surrealists, as was Camus – though I could
not find a record of the two ever being friends. Around the time of writing this play,
America had been caught up in Vietnam, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and
Martin Luther King was assassinated. So much of what was happening in the world
must have seemed absurd, like we were “idiots being governed by imbeciles.”

Therefore, it is timely that this brilliant ensemble have revived the play, at our own
time of apparent global madness, to show us that “joy was here,” and perhaps if
come to our senses and go to the theatre, we may rediscover it there, if nowhere
else!