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.

The Chairs

by Eugène Ionesco

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 2 March 2022

Omar Elerian directs his own adapted translation of Ionesco's 1952 play Les Chaises, in which an Old Man (Marcello Magni) and his wife (Kathryn Hunter) prepare for the arrival of a Speaker (Toby Sedgwick) who is to articulate the Old Man's important message to a specially invited audience. As more and more guests arrive the Old Man and the Old Woman become involved in arcane conversations while trying to set out enough chairs to seat everybody before the Speaker himself arrives.

The absurdist element to this play is that none of the guests is visible, so all the remarks they might be making have to be inferred from the reactions and replies of the old couple. Their conversation with each other mixes banality, exasperation and affection, and the situation veers between farce and total incomprehension. The Speaker, when he finally arrives, cannot speak.

In this production, designed by Cécile Trémolières and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen, the stage is initially masked by draped light blue curtains, which when opened reveal a space also hung with swaggd material. It gives the effect of a down-at-heel old-fashioned proscenium stage, suitable perhaps for the slightly hysterical music-hall turns of the elderly couple. A doorbell sounds noisily to announce the arrival of guests, but sometimes it is on the left and somethimes on the right. Neither the Old Man nor the Old Woman seems at all perplexed by this anomaly.

Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter (husband and wife in real life also) are masters at the art of conveying absolute attention to their predicament in a double act that holds the audience's attention through all the grotesquerie, giving hints of the tragedy that lies behind their evident loneliness and their desperate attempts to allay it. He is dressed smartly in intention, but somewhat dishevelled, while she looks like an overgrown and at times disturbingly wizened child. As these two actors have long been associated with the Complicité tradition there are some wonderful sight gags with imaginary and real props throughout the performance.

The adaptation departs in some significant respects from the original. It begins with an overheard conversation in which Magni is apparently suffering from stage fright and refusing to go on. It ends with a long rambling disquisition by Toby Sedgwick in his own persona on the playwright's intentions, and the way they have been subverted by the 'accident' of his being mistaken as one of the late arriving guests, rather than as the Speaker himself. And in the middle of the performance the fourth wall is deliberately broken as two members of the audience are invited onto the stage to help greet the guests. There is of course much fun to be had with this ploy, since the Old Man can confidently reprimand one of these helpers for tripping over a guest, or for holding out a hand to someone who is plainly not there.

The final monologue defuses the manic energy of what has gone before, but it was a great opportunity to see one of the defining works of Absurdist drama revived by a stellar double act.