This Guardian pick of the year 2025 recently closed at London’s Almeida theatre, but it is definitely worth anthologizing for prosperity. I hope this also gives me the licence to write freely without the fear of spoilers, unless of course this worthy show gets a transfer and a tour, in which case you can skip reading and definitely see it.
In some ways this production of Eugene Ionesco’s play, translated and directed by Palestinian-Italian director Omar Elerian is a sequel to his post-Covid hit with Ionesco’s The Chairs also at the Almeida in 2022. The absurdity of im/mortality inherent to that play is here superseded by an interest in the workings of fascism — as topical nowadays as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War when the play was written (1959 to be precise). Where The Chairs was maestrally delivered by the double act of Lecoq and Complicite fame Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni with an added cameo from Toby Sedgwick, Rhinoceros is more of an ensemble piece, featuring similarly familiar funny faces such as Paul Hunter and Hayley Carmichael of Told By an Idiot, Joshua McGuire, and Sophie Steer, as well as classically trained Alan Williams, musical wonder John Biddle, and the rising stars Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Anoushka Lucas. With Sedgwick appearing this time in his role as movement director, this ensemble seriously exceeds the sum of all its parts.
As a reminder: Ionesco’s play deals with a mysterious and eventually all-engulfing appearance of a rhinoceros in a small French town. At first dismissed as unFrench and therefore improbable, the unseen animal gradually starts to multiply by spreading the disease of rhinoceritis and taking people to its side. The play charts how the infection causes transformation of individuals and affects specific relationships. The central character Bérenger (played with committed earnestness by Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) is an unkempt bohemian working at a local newspaper office. We meet him in a number of progressively threatening scenarios including the succumbing to the epidemic of his friend Jean (McGuire) and eventually also his sweetheart Daisy (Lucas) with whom he has briefly considered repopulating the world with new humans.
Elerian has retranslated the play with a view to making it relatable to a 21st century audience. Far from aiming for a ‘translator’s invisibility’ (a concept made famous by translation theorist Lawrence Venuti), Elerian inserts a metacommentary dimension to the text in which he gets to reflect and expand on Ionesco’s own prompts such as logic vs. intuition, language and meaning, and ultimately even on the contemporary moral value of the author’s work itself.
As a director, Elerian rather unconventionally therefore elects to sound out all stage directions as well. Paul Hunter’s Narrator performs the task of actually speaking the diegetic content from the text and actively building a rapport with the audience towards a point of interactive participation. Seemingly innocently we are openly told from the outset that in the theatre we must relinquish individuality in favour of community, and that the most important thing is our imagination. Hence we proceed to imagine, even without any explicit prompting, that a watermelon can indeed stand for a cat, and very soon this investment will have paid off, because [spoiler 1] when Ionesco’s cat on the page has been run over by a rhinoceros, Elerian’s cat on the stage is represented by the smashed up red flesh of the fruit. Usefully for later too, Hunter’s Narrator warms us up at the outset with a concentration game using our hands in a number of ways (described by my friendly neighbour as a ‘Trump cognitive test’) all of which ends in a clap.
To show us figuratively the workings of our own imagination, the company deliver some mesmerizing ensemble work in the use of foley in the course of act 2, with the sounds of typewriting, photocopying and doorslamming all being neatly synced up from the sides with the corresponding mimed actions centre stage.
Elerian’s production is super-theatrical and a real work of authorship, but unlike many auteur directors before him, he does not dismiss and devalue the text in favour of his craft. On the contrary, he aims for fully comprehensive, footnote-rich treatment of it. This lack of editing and selection may be the production’s only drawback that results in a relative loss of focus at times. However, the show’s playfulness and attention to detail combined with total conceptual clarity really makes up for it.
Other spoiler-worthy moments that distinguish this production from its predecessors occur towards the end when hungry Daisy re-appears with watermelon, this time as a snack, then sings (rather beautifully) a rousing song in Italian which Elerian the translator’s surtitles urge us to ‘just listen to it’, no matter if we don’t understand it: ‘maybe you could just feel it, what do you need meaning for?’ This of course is exactly how populism works – by appealing to sentiment rather than reason, but the metacommentary itself ironically provides a critical distance so the audience can continue to watch themselves at all times. When it comes to the crucial moment in Elerian’s production where the playwright prescribes a slap against a woman, but the company cannot bring themselves to do it, this is where our foley contribution in the form of the concentration game the Narrator taught us earlier, is designed to come in useful, though hopefully not without some wincing on our part. And we are required to watch ourselves all the way to the end too, especially when we continue to clap at the curtain call despite the fact that Bérenger – incidentally played by the only black man on stage – is still repeatedly shouting ‘I won’t surrender’ instead of taking a bow.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Duška Radosavljević.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
