Part of the reason that there’s not been a London production of Eugene Ionesco’s classic absurdist satire Rhinoceros in almost 20 years is that there’s not a huge amount you can *do* to it: it is a drama about a town full of people turning into rhinos as an allegory for totalitarianism – you can’t really graft on a radical new meaning or central conceit.
But Omar Elerian – contemporary British theatre’s most consummate director of leftfield absurdism – very much has his cake and eats it with an enjoyable revival that pays fanboy-esque homage to Ionesco’s 1959 original, while also bolting on loads of fun extra stuff.
Specifically, he has roped in Paul Hunter and Hayley Carmichael – best known as the wilfully chaotic theatre company Told By An Idiot – to augment his show. While the wild haired Carmichael joins in with the excellent, idiosyncratic ensemble, Hunter acts as a sort of gloriously anarchic meta narrator. Reading out the stage directions (which are followed loosely at best), he chummily chats to the audience and gets us to copy his increasingly complicated moves, in an opening that both reflects the play’s sardonic commentary on conformity and is also a bloody good laugh in a kids’ birthday party style.
Hunter is clearly man of the match, and the casting of him and Carmichael defines Elerian’s production. But they’re the heart of a terrific company and a gleefully meandering, shaggy dog like take on the play that reaches something like its apex when Anoushka Lucas – as Berenger’s crush Daisy – for some reason belts out a song in Italian while the words ‘what do you want meaning for?’ are projected on the wall.
Adaptor-director Elerian’s take both deconstructs Ionesco and feels reverentially respectful to him. Excerpts from books about him are literally read out, so we all know how great Ionesco was. His stage directions are read out. And indeed, Brecht looms equally large here - Elerian never lets you forget for a second that you’re watching a play, but never stops having fun reminding you.
At the heart of all the artifice is a much more naturalistic central performance from Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as Berenger, an affable schlub who just wants to get on with his life in a low-key way. Not that his fellow citizens respect that: the townsfolk constantly lecture, hector and condescend towards Berenger, maintaining a sense of superiority even as they are all slowly sucked into… whatever is happening in the town. At first the odd rhino sighting is a matter of curiosity, debate and disbelief. After a while it becomes apparent that people are literally transforming into the destructive, thick skinned beasts and that there’s a degree of choice in the matter. As swathes of society capitulate – often making up flimsy rationalisations – Dìrísù‘s bleary eyed normalcy becomes a super power: he can’t accept the absurdity of being a rhino, even when he tries.
It would be a legitimate reading to slap a red MAGA baseball cap on all the rhinos, but the play‘s subtext hardly needs spelling out in 60-foot letters. Elerian and crew are content to keep things puckish, with the rhinos in fact represented by kazoos distributed to audience members at the interval (we even get a brief history of the kazoo from Hunter).
Elerian rightly trusts in the enduring satirical potency of Ionesco’s 66-year-old play. But he also trusts himself and his cast to give a 2025 audience a damn good time. Faithful without being dogmatic, the tone is kept light and mischievous until a chilling kamikaze ending deliberately breaks the easy-going tone and sends us out deeply unnerved.