Rhinoceros at the Almeida: The kazoo can’t save this absurdist mishmash
Rhinoceros | Almeida| ★★★☆☆
Rhinoceros is a play about a provincial French town in which the people start turning into rhinoceroses. Of course it’s not actually about that at all though. Written in 1959 by French-Romanian absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros is a thinly-veiled allegory about fascism and conformism. Beringer, our softy-spoken, self-repudiating protagonist, refuses to join the herd. The Almeida’s decision to stage a version in 2025 is worthy and clever, but not overly moving.
Director Omar Elerian said he wished to bring out more of the playfulness from the original French text in his production, and at this he certainly succeeds. There’s a watermelon playing a cat, the audience are given kazoos and the cast has ample opportunity to show off punctilious comic timing. Joshua McGuire as Jean is particularly springy, switching from pouty to threatening with hair-raising ease, and there’s a lot of fun to be had for the audience, who are told from the start they must suspend their disbelief.
The stage is expansive but barely filled, creating a sterile feel. Bar Berenger, the play opens with the cast all dressed in long white lab coats, accessorised with flashes of primary colours that pop out against the stark white: royal blue trousers, shiny yellow shoes and bright red lipstick.
Dressed in muted tones throughout by contrast, Sope Dirisu’s Beringer is marked out as separate from the start. Growing increasingly manic at the rest of the town’s indifference to the rhinoceros problem, Beringer is a symbol of resistance. Dirisu’s performance starts quiet and climbs to a genuinely spine-chilling crescendo, with the play closing as he shouts out wildly and desperately as the rest of the ensemble bow.
It’s a powerful end but I wonder what we’re actually meant to take from it. Berenger is supposed to be an everyman, but, set apart from the start, his strength of resistance appears powered by an innate goodness rather than anything more instructive. On the contrary, every other character in the play succumbs to the rhinoceros affliction – presumably because they’re weak?
This production’s major intervention with the text, however, is to turn it from just a strange play to a self-consciously strange play. Paul Hunter regularly jumps out of the action to narrate from a mic at the front, reading out the stage directions, describing what the set design should be (this production is choicely sparse on scenery) and occasionally cutting through tension with shouts of “Act 2!” and the like. It’s the sort of thing that spells out “this is a clever play” and proves tiresome rather quickly. The involvement of the audience, who are turned into a chorus of rhinos thanks to the kazoos, conversely is the sort of seemingly silly choice that actually packs a punch. Who knew the sound of a kazoo could be so chilling? The theatre of the absurd, of course.
Elsewhere, updates include some slapdash 21st century references (Gary Lineker, Severance, Elon Musk), which conversely results in making the play feel dated. This is a play with themes that speak to our time, but the original, while relying on allegory, is specific in its references – the rhinos are green-skinned to reference the green uniforms of the Iron Guard, a character of a logician spewing syllogisms is a caricature of Ionesco’s own logician friend who cut him off, and the Marxist Dudard, who refuses to accept the rhinoceros problem even when seeing it with his own eyes, is simply Sartre, Ionesco stated in an interview. A couple of 2025 references thrown in with what was already a metaphorical mishmash doesn’t offer much illumination on how the play should speak to us now.