Theatre review: Rhinoceros

Omar Elerian continues to be a big advocate of Eugène Ionesco's work, returning to the Almeida after The Chairs to adapt and direct Rhinoceros, a play whose wildness, chaos and horrors mirror the real-life situations it satirises. A quiet Sunday in a small village that may or may not be in France is disrupted when a rhinoceros charges through the square, later followed by a second one (or the same one doing a loop.) Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù plays Berenger, who's already got problems with alcohol before the play starts, and is unlikely to find it easier to cope once the rhinos start arriving - particularly as everyone else in town seems to view them as a minor inconvenience at most. But as the week goes on and everyone tries to get back to work, things are further disrupted as it becomes apparent this isn't an incursion of pachiderms from outside: The human residents are, one by one, turning into rhinos.

Berenger is caught in a nightmare everyone else seems to be either gleefully embracing, or shrugging off as something they can't do much about. By the end he's trying to hold onto his own humanity, and that of the woman he loves, co-worker Daisy (Anoushka Lucas.)

It's a while since I last saw this play, in a Royal Court production with a collapsing set and full-size rhinos crashing through the walls. Here theatre of the absurd is taken to even more expressionist and minimalist extremes, with Ana Inés Jabares-Pita giving us a white stage full of platforms, steps and cupboards, and a supporting cast blending into it in white lab coats. As for the titular animals, it's fair to say I haven't seen many shows that leaned so heavily on the kazoo to conjure their world.

Elerian's conceit is to add an extra layer of disconnect between the lead and everyone else on stage, so that he appears not only not to understand everyone else's reactions within the story, but also to have been left outside of the production's storytelling world. Dìrísù begins as the only cast member not in the lab coat uniform; as Paul Hunter's narrator reads out the stage directions the rest of the cast (rounded out by John Biddle, Hayley Carmichael, Joshua McGuire, Sophie Steer and Alan Williams) build the imaginary world with their bodies and a few props, and add sound effects at foley desks at the side. But Dìrísù seems not to know the rules of the game.

This conceit of him being slightly outside his own story builds to an intense finale, but before that point the layering of the surreal can be a bit much, and yields mixed results: The comedy has some real hits as well as some awkwardly misfiring segments, the drama has knockout moments as well as sections that drag out frustratingly. It was a bit too scattershot for some - Ian left at the interval and didn't appear to be the only one.

But some of the frustration is deliberate and chillingly familiar: Ionesco wrote the play in response to the rise of Nazism, and the discourse in the play is often all-too similar to the kind we see today: From outright denials that the rhinocreroses exist, to the endless discussion of how many horns they have and what kind of rhino that makes them, the way Berenger's attempts to actually understand and fight what's happening get derailed by straw men and distractions could come from any online discussion. His final scenes of trying to protect Daisy from her own inevitable conversion are also intense, and Dìrísù maintains a dishevelled everyman charm that keeps us with the story even when its ideas don't quite hit the mark.

Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco in a version by Omar Elerian is booking until the 26th of April at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.