“An author should not have to deliver a message, because he is not a postman,” Eugene Ionesco quipped in a 1984 interview with the Paris Review. It’s one of my favourite pronouncements on theatre. I’ve highlighted it, underlined it and circled it so many times in my printed copy that the words are now barely legible. A case of too much enthusiasm obscuring the very thing it celebrates.
Something similar happens in Théâtre français de Toronto’s production of Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, performed in French with English surtitles at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre. Karine Ricard’s exuberant direction is keenly attuned to our political moment, as the resurgence of extremism makes this 1959 play particularly resonant. Yet at times, the production falls into a familiar trap of staging the so-called Theatre of the Absurd: trading existential anguish for comic eccentricity.
Beneath Ionesco’s bitter, neurotic laughter lies a profound mal d’être. Consider Bérenger, the unlikely hero of Rhinocéros. Over three acts, the inhabitants of his provincial town turn, one by one, into the titular animals — an allegory commonly read in relation to the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe. Bérenger alone resists the metamorphosis, only to find himself utterly isolated. By the play’s end, he even tries to turn himself into a rhino. But he cannot. Neither at home among humans nor able to join the herd, he embodies the vertigo of trying to find one’s place in a meaningless world.
But this spineless habitual drinker is hardly a paragon of virtue. Mickaël Girouard makes him a suitably pitiable figure. Shoulders slumped, face fixed in a perpetual frown, he seems almost amoebic, barely capable of holding himself upright. “Je me sens mal à l’aise dans l’existence” (“I feel ill at ease with existence”), he confesses to his friend Jean (Nicolas Van Burek), who is busy lecturing him about his negativity.
Across the stage, a logician (Sébastien Bertrand) and a proprietor (Pierre Simpson) string together increasingly preposterous syllogisms. Their crowning conclusion? Socrates was a cat. It’s a sly demonstration of how the language of reason can be twisted into nonsense. But Ricard pushes the scene toward broad slapstick. In a Mr. Bean-like routine, the proprietor repeatedly attempts to sit down, leaving the hapless logician scrambling to reposition his chair.
The production’s frenetic energy extends to its visual and musical palette. Melanie McNeill‘s costumes burst with shocking pinks, bright yellows, and clashing patterns, while Steáfán Hannigan’s festive jazz score weaves the scenes together. Yet the relentless pursuit of laughter sometimes backfires. When a rhinoceros tramples a passerby’s cat offstage, somewhere behind the audience, its owner (Christina Tannous) erupts into a barrage of shrieks and drawn-out wails. Despite the frantic effort to wring laughs from the moment, the eccentric choice landed with a thud at the performance I attended.
Beneath this clownerie, an undercurrent of disquiet occasionally breaks through, finding wonderfully poetic expression in Glenn Davidson’s set. As Bérenger repeatedly checks his forehead for signs of a horn, mirrors proliferate across the stage: there are hanging frames along the backdrop, wheeled reflective panels, and even glossy squares on the floor. The audience, too, is caught in this game of reflections, repeatedly confronted with its own image. Who, after all, is immune to the herd?
Some of Ricard’s most effective touches emerge from this design. During one scene change, the actors circle the stage, rearranging objects to a pulsing, oppressive score, their faces illuminated by the glow of their mobile phones. It’s a pointed evocation of today’s digital echo chambers, where algorithm-fed convictions can harden into extremism.
The arguments made in defence of the rhinoceroses even echo Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Jean, initially horrified by the creatures, gradually becomes their defender. “Rhinoceroses are living creatures the same as us,” he declares. “They’ve got as much right to life as we have.” As Van Burek’s body contorts, his frame growing rigid and imposing, his voice swells into an animal bellow. The language of tolerance becomes a justification for surrendering to the herd.
Perhaps with fewer bizarre, buffoonish flourishes — and an interval during its 100-minute runtime — Ionesco’s provocative play would have more room to breathe. Still, there’s something admirable about TfT bringing Rhinocéros to a city whose stages teem with contemporary work but offer fewer encounters with the theatrical landmarks of the last century. (And hearing Ionesco’s words in their original French is a pleasure all its own.) More than six decades after it was written, this incendiary play still speaks to the present. It hardly needs to shout.
Rhinocéros runs at the Berkeley Street Theatre until November 8. More information is available here.
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WRITTEN BY
Alessandro Stracuzzi
Alessandro Stracuzzi is a Toronto-based theatre critic and performance researcher from Italy. He holds an MA in Performance Studies from the University of Milan, and writes about contemporary theatre, performance, and experimental practices. His criticism has appeared in Stage Door, Our Theatre Voice, Stratagemmi, and Fermata Spettacolo.
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