FringeReview UK 2025

Rhinoceros

Almeida Theatre

Genre: Absurd Theatre, Adaptation, classical, Comedic, Drama, International, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, Theatrical Clown

Venue: Almeida Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

On the only other occasion I saw Ionesco’s Rhinoceros the transformation of one man into a pachyderm is blocked as a slow-motion leap from a window accompanied by Matt Munro singing ‘Born Free’. Ionesco would have been furious at such playful liberties, some said; but it was hilarious. Omar Elerian directs Rhinoceros at the Almeida till April 26^th.

Acclaimed for his production of Ionesco’s The Chairs here three years ago (which again he translated), Elerian too thinks humour the way to frame Rhinoceros, though distending it to two hours-forty he loses some of the ferocious stampede of the piece. Whilst there’s (for me) nothing quite so comic as the Munro moment, that’s because Elerian frames the whole play – in itself faithfully rendered down to names and plot – with clowning.

Avoiding obvious contemporary parallels with the fascism the 1959 piece evoked, Elerian wishes (like Ionesco) to widen his premise: conformism is at the root of complicity, and ultimately lets in fascism, and much else, through the front door. Elerian doesn’t blink at saying so. His poise in 2025 is admirable, even miraculous. This Rhinoceros, as Ionesco would wish, doesn’t point at barbarism; it tells us we’re the barbarians. Framing the production with a refreshed aesthetic to recall the shock of the 1950s, Elerian finally lands a coup of stark power worth waiting for.

With this new device the ‘Narrator’ or “Provocateur” (Paul Hunter, of Told By An Idiot) addresses the audience directly, invites participation including warm-up exercises, causes an outbreak of kazoos (putting the audience more in holiday humour than anything else) and generally encourages everyone (and one in particular) to go with the herd and avoid fomo. He quotes Tynan on Rhinoceros, references Trump and Gary Lineker, invokes fake news. No-one’s bored by this distention, but occasionally the play itself might be.

Through Told By An Idiot, Hunter’s associated with Kathryn Hunter and her late husband Marcello Magni, who so nailed The Chairs. And Hunter’s the one to make as much of this new material as possible: but it lacks their classical framing and though the point’s clear, you still feel Hunter’s a little wasted.

Elerian’s deeply serious about fun, and whatever Ionesco might have thought, there’s clearly funny bones in the piece: not for nothing did it inspire the 2008 dystopic farce film Zombie Strippers. Elerian’s though is a take on the play to reckon with. And with Ana Inés Jabares-Pita set of clinical white, often dominated by the cast as equally squeaky-looking scientists, it’s hardly surprising the central character Berenger (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) presents as a tabula rasa himself. Till near the end.

A permanently office-late, slightly drunk and dishevelled man, his very raggedness suggests accidental resistance; while at least three tidier minds somehow argue themselves into barbarism through a process of irrefutable logic. Dìrísù’s everyman finds himself out-argued and even slowly abandoned.

Character types are lightning silhouettes. There’s Berenger’s friend Jean (a bullish boulevard intellectual in Joshua McGuire’s hands), whose metamorphosis into a rhinoceros is the most viscerally realised. John Biddle’s both Logician and polite rationalist Dudard, but he’s also to be found tucked behind a piano riffing Bach (that Almeida thing) and generally music director. Alan Williams, principally pompous boss Mr Papillon, embodies French officialdom. As those who’ve seen rhinos argue with (in particular) Botard (Hunter) denying everything, the mechanics of blind  complicity and rewriting one’s beliefs are laid out in a forensic titter.

Toby Sedgwick’s playful choreography and movement ensures the cast’s perpetual clowning. Hayley Carmichael (principally Mrs Boeuf borne off riding a Rhino, and Grocer) and Hunter in particular relish this.  Strikingly, Sophie Steer’s Lady, her cat a large watermelon carried under her arm, morphs into a wailing wreck as she shows up a huge melon slice: the cat’s trampled under a second rhino. She reappears as a loud and irritated Firefighter.

Insidious unravelling comes with the most resistant, the most nurturing. of Berenger’s relationships: office secretary Daisy (Anoushka Lucas) who betrays feeling for him, falsifying his time-sheets then moving in with him.

At one spellbinding moment she sings in Italian , with words projected on the backwall “What do you want meaning for?” It’s one of many points when this production touches the sublime, with this exceptional cast.

After this, it’s too late to join. The end, eschewing comedy is extraordinary, integrating disruptions with theatrical power. You feel if more moments had been on this level, it would have been a masterpiece. That’s why the National’s 2018 Exit the King was so overwhelming.

There’s blissful moments though. Stage right a typewriter jabs and props like a tray float as a café table. There’s mix of real sounds just as Elena Peña’s sonics of imaginary doors and other invisible animals synch with irresistible physical acting. It creates everything from photocopier clicks – where Jackie Shemesh’s lighting  flicks – to where lighting does heavy lifts and spotlighting.

Rhinoceroses are as now rare as Ionesco: with the Almeida, Elerian’s brought two of his to the capital, becoming de facto standard-bearer of the Absurd. Bar Southwark’s The Lesson from 2022, and that Exit the King, there’s been little else. Though Ionesco would be good, others -Arthur Adamov and Boris Vian perhaps – cry out for exposure, so we can see what we’ve missed. Don’t miss this. It’s provoking, wholly in spirit, with moments of great power.

Published April 3, 2025April 3, 2025 by Simon Jenner