Rhinoceros

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Dates in September
Fri 21 Sep 2007	7:00pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
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Reviews

4 stars Nicholas de Jongh, 28th September 2007, Evening Standard

Mocking a metamorphosis

What abundant laughter attends Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros! Dominic Cooke’s alluring production of this Theatre of the Absurd black comedy – a classic allegory – was first seen at the Court with Laurence Olivier in 1960.

It reminds us how accomplished British actors are at sending-up Gallic pomposity and pedantry. Ionesco’s purpose, though, is deadly serious. In 1938 the Romanian-born writer noticed how his friends succumbed to Romania’s fascist Iron Guard as if seized by a contagion. He described them as akin to rhinoceroses.

His play cynically views the human drive to conformity and, perhaps influenced by Hitler’s occupation of France, an ostrich-like refusal to face the truth. “They’re not fundamentally aggressive,” claims Paul Chahidi’s Dudard, as rhinoceroses run wild through the town.

At first comedy rules. How cruelly pleasing to watch Ionesco’s blinkered inhabitants of a seriously provincial French town when the first rhinoceros, unseen but thunderous as a Tube train, crashes into the central square. The damage to Anthony Ward’s unevocative and underdeveloped set is an omen of turbulence. Although townsfolk are quick to anger, outrage and anxiety, they take time to reach a panicky awareness that the rhinoceroses are metamorphosed human beings.

Two scenes, one preposterously amusing, the other shimmering with black comedy, mark the process. An employee’s wife (Alwyne Taylor’s delectable Madame Boeuf) arrives at the grimly bureaucratic office where the placid hero, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Berenger, labours. She is pursued by a rhinoceros that she realises is her own husband.

Berenger’s best friend, Jasper Britton’s Jean, who first appears in a three-piece suit and a fit of smug, self-adoring belligerence, later undergoes a swift physical and vocal transformation that marks his rhinocerisation.

Britton’s powerfully articulated performance, a comic and dramatic bull’s-eye, is not matched by Cumberbatch’s. As Berenger he effectively registers amiability and gauche passion for Zawe Ashton’s Daisy but not real terror when he takes a defiant stand to resist becoming a rhinoceros.

Cooke, fortified by Martin Crimp’s wittily amusing translation, works best in the fields of black comedy. He has a clear eye for menace, too, with the chilling final tableau of rhinoceroses surrounding all exits in Berenger’s wrecked apartment.

The text, though, needs trimming. The prolonged satirical-absurdist arguments, which make laboured nonsense of logic, need severe pruning. Even so Rhinoceros remains utterly captivating.

4 stars Benedict Nightingale, 1st October 2007, The Times

Rhinoceros

The Royal Court has long justified its claim to be the national theatre of new writing by presenting more premieres than any other playhouse I know. So should Dominic Cooke, its recently appointed director, be personally staging Ionesco’s anti-fascist parable 62 years after Hitler’s death and 47 after the play first appeared in Paris?

In my view, absolutely. After all, one definition of a new play is that, whenever it was written, it feels new now; and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros jangles as many nerves in 2007 as Priestley’s An Inspector Calls famously did in the 1990s. Moreover, the Court makes a particularly suitable setting for the piece. You can still hear Tube trains rumbling below the theatre; but in Cooke’s revival an everyday rumble becomes a thunderous hubbub that leaves the cast shaking and dust filling the stage. Somehow the rising noise seems to reinforce Ionescos suggestion that a minor-seeming event can escalate into moral, social and political disaster.

The play’s unheroic hero, Benedict Cumberbatch’s rumpled, apologetic, vaguely alcoholic and pathologically ineffective Brenger, finds himself watching his fellow citizens become rhinos. In a highly comical scene, his supercilious, judgmental friend, Jasper Britton’s Jean, ends up rampaging round his bedroom and bursting through the wall complete with leathery body and upturned horn. But it’s not so funny when smug conservatives, bolshie union men, philosophers, everyone but Berenger succumb to the lure of the jungle.

You can discern Ionesco’s particular target when Jean declares that moral laws are anti-nature and primordial wholeness needs rediscovering, or when a colleague argues that rhinos have a case worth hearing and are very, very efficient. But a nation doesn’t need to submit to National Socialism to be endangered by creeping conformism.

Strong acting helps to disguise the play’s excessive wordiness. Moreover, Martin Crimp’s lively translation, full of 2007 jargon, gives an immediacy to what’s subtle as well as obvious in Ionesco’s satire. Berenger is an individualist who, he says, will never become a pachyderm. But he also feels isolated, ugly, and, at some level, wishes he too could join a herd whose beauty he suddenly sees. Maybe we all have our inner fascists and must resist that too.

Kate Bassett, 30th September 2007, Independent on Sunday

Rhinoceros

Eugene Ionesco’s classic fantasy Rhinoceros (1959) proves a rich, shifting allegory in Dominic Cooke’s fast-paced revival. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the alcoholic scruff Berenger, who is stuck in a regimented office job when rhinos start galloping through town. Then everyone starts following the herd, changing into snorting pachyderms. Soon they have taken over the town. Maybe they are enjoying liberation. Or are they, metaphorically, fascistic storm troopers? In this new production, the rhinos start to sound like the thugs who rule our streets. Suddenly, this is a play for the anxious middle-classes of contemporary Britain.

Susannah Clapp, 30th September 2007, The Observer

Rhinoceros

Dominic Cooke has directed Ionesco’s Rhinoceros – which had its British premiere at the Royal Court in 1960 – with such brio that he almost makes you think the heavy-footed pachyderm is a high-flying swallow. Ionesco’s absurdist drama shows a cluster of people a bit alarmed when rhinos charge around their bourgeois lives, and majorly frightened when everyone starts turning into rhinos; they calm down and join the horned ones when they are in the majority. Encrusted with jokes of the philosophic, ontological kind (that’s to say, not very funny kind), the play can be read as a critique of totalitarianism and conformism, and as an Ionesco examination of fluid identity, when the audience is supposed to fall into angsting about whether they are rhino or Rhine maiden. It skits and syllogises, and flaunts its minimal significance: the rhino is the reverse of the elephant in the room – it’s always talked about, but not always there. This production makes the best of it.

Martin Crimp’s witty translation makes a rhino-human conflict look sometimes like racism, sometimes like a catwalk spat. There’s effortlessly exact acting from Jasper Britton and Benedict Cumberbatch. And Cooke’s staging takes on the psychic disturbance of the characters: slatted wood walls splinter; a pit opens up in mid-office; tusked faces burst out around a bedroom. A non-rhino normal person suddenly looks weird to himself. Which makes a fusty play look sharp.

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