It is a quiet Sunday morning in the square of a small town in France, when a rumbling sound and loud trumpeting disturbs the peace. The noise heralds the unlikely arrival of a rhinoceros charging through the square. Several minutes later a second rhinoceros thunders past, crushing a cat under its feet. Several onlookers argue about whether it was the same beast as before, and whether it had one horn or two, while others who did not see it do not believe the reports of its existence at all. The town is soon gripped by an epidemic of “rhinoceritis”, where the human population transform into rhinoceros themselves.
This is Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist satire, Rhinoceros. Written in French in 1959, the play’s surreal scenario was conceived as a metaphor for support for the rise of fascism in Europe between the two world wars, and for conformism more generally. The play Rhinoceros was first performed in an English translation on BBC Radio in August 1959, before its first stage productions in Dusseldorf later that year, and then at the Odeon in Paris 1960. In April 1960, the play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London under the direction of Orson Welles, with Laurence Olivier as Bérenger, the everyman character who becomes the last human being to resist joining the rhinoceros herd. The Royal Court Theatre revived the play in 2007 with Benedict Cumberbatch as Bérenger, and as we record this episode an imaginative new adaptation of the play is playing at the Almeida theatre here in London. I’m delighted to be joined to review Ionesco’s classic by the show’s translator and director, Omar Elerian.
