Rhinoceros

by Eugène Ionesco

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 16 April 2025

Omar Elerian directs Rhinoceros having translated and adapted it especially for this production, for which the set and costumes are designed by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita. It features Sopé Dìrisù as Berenger, Joshua McGuire as Jean, Anoushka Lucas as Daisy, Paul Hunter as the Narrator and Botard, and John Biddle, Hayley Carmichael, Sophie Steer and Alan Williams taking other parts.

Two major things are happening: a radical interrogation of theatrical experience, and a fantastical story set in a small town ("not in France", this Narrator insists, despite the French names of many of the characters) in which almost all the townspeople except the increasingly agitated Berenger turn into rhinoceroses. The stage is bare and white, with a rostrum in the middle and a raised platform at the back (luckily with steps down to the main acting area), and a table on either side each holding a variety of implements used by the cast to create sound effects. The Narrator, having begun with a welcome to the audience and a warm-up session in which we are encouraged to follow his gestures at first in real time, and then one gesture behind his, and then two (by which time almost everyone is relaxed, amused and confused), then sets the scenes, helping the actors as much as the audience to visualise where they are. He frequently reads all the stage directions as well.

With all this business to distract us, the sheer implausibility of the transformations can be smuggled past us, especially as the first appearance (or rather drumming sound) of a rhinoceros is not connected with any claim that it was once a person. What we are first concentrating on is the rather prickly friendship of two very different people - the uptight Berenger and the laid-back Jean. Later there is an increasingly chaotic scene in an office one Monday morning: there are more rhinoceroses roaming by then, and it transpires that one of them is one of the office workers, whom the manager had assumed was merely malingering.

By this time, the visual style of the production, the painstaking reading out of stage directions, the occasionally hesitant and often inappropriate attempts of the cast to enact the directions, and the weird progression of events, have conspired to make for much hilarity, but in the second half, when Berenger visits Jean to apologise for creating bad feelings between them, we witness (so far as is possible) Jean's own transformation, a superb piece of physical acting by Joshua McGuire, and later we the audience are conscripted into providing an unpleasant sound effect (by following the Narrator's gestures again) when Berenger baulks at slapping his girlfriend Daisy. Many in the audience had been provided with kazoos during the interval: they too had become rhinoceroses. By the end of the play, only Berenger is proclaiming his determination to resist the communal transformation, desperately shouting his resistance while the others take the curtain call. What seemed like an absurdist joke has become a disquieting examination of herd mentality and dehumanisation: no wonder the play was seen as a commentary on French collaboration during the Vichy years.

The jokiness of the visual style, and the commitment of the cast to taking their predicament seriously, means that there is very little overt preaching or too-obvious allegorising in the production, leaving us to find whatever messages we want in the undercurrents of a play by turns hilarious and worrying.