An absurdist fable for fascism, The Almeida's production of Rhinoceros is a rare beast on London's stages

Independent

02-04-2025

Eugène Ionesco's 1959 absurdist play Rhinoceros has long been seen as an allegory for the rise of fascism, showing how people are gaslighted, coerced and coddled into putting up with a bizarre new status quo. So it would be easy for Omar Elerian's adaptation to play up the obvious Trump parallels. Refreshingly, he hasn't, instead crafting something that deliberately floats above ugly political realities, buoyant as a child's balloon.
Here, Sopé Dìrísù (Gangs of London) plays Bérenger, a scruffy everyman surrounded by conformist bores in white coats. Not least his sanctimonious friend Jean, given a winning smugness by Joshua McGuire (Cheaters), who tells him off for boozing and not wearing a tie. When a rhino rampages through his small French town, Bérenger is horrified, but his friends and colleagues soon bury themselves in dry philosophical debates that accustom them to a new pachyderm-centric way of life.
Elerian takes a Brechtian approach to the play, reading out Ionesco's elaborate stage directions and comically misinterpreting them for the audience's amusement (a cat is played by a giant watermelon). Everything is artificial here, from the live foley sound effects to the strange swirly shapes into which the actors' hair has been teased. This deliberate non-naturalism makes it hard to settle into the world of the play, especially since Elerian has chucked so many different jarring elements into the mix here. Some early scenes inflate like over-proved dough, with their long preambles and verbal repartee that's too literally translated to achieve full hilarity. But as the leathery-skinned beasts multiply, this production's power grows, helped by wonderfully imaginative bits of physical theatre.
McGuire's transformation into a silver-skinned monster is a marvel, his shifting body capturing how attempts to empathise with extreme positions can open you up to losing your own values. Hayley Carmichael quakes like a freshly-birthed faun after her encounter with a rhino, but soon her terror matures into a surreal kind of love. And Paul Hunter acts as an unofficial emcee and anchor in this strange world, gently inculcating the audience into its rules.
Dìrísù initially feels a bit lost here, giving a straightforwardly truthful performance among all these heightened grotesques. But there's a mounting power in that as the final scenes draw in and chaos reigns, thundering hooves crushing everything he used to know. A production like this is a rare beast on London's stages – with its gleeful non-naturalism, witty physical theatre and tooting kazoos – and it deserves to be appreciated.