Rhinoceros was premiered in English at the Royal Court Theatre in 1960 when its author Eugene Ionesco, along with Beckett, Adamov, Pinter, and other practitioners of the Theatre of the Absurd, were at the height of fashion. Seeing this revival of Rhinoceros 47 years on, directed by Dominic Cooke and translated by Martin Crimp, I felt initially how quaint, dated and safely pre-9/11 the Absurd was, an innocent 60s luxury in which pale middle-class students were terribly sorry for themselves because the world was meaningless and true communication with fellow-humans was limited. How self-indulgent it all seemed, and the first scene in this production only reinforced that sense. Bourgeois and petit bourgeois burghers walking in a French town on a Sunday morning are surprised by a stampeding rhinoceros, and the conformity and banality of their reactions are satirised in a way that is only too conformist, banal and predictable itself. It evoked a hundred smarty-pants student productions of a hundred stale forgotten plays over the last forty years. So did the obviously intended mockery of "logic" as uttered by the self-styled "logician" for being illogical, and the way conversations of different groups at a café are identically dreary and drearily overlap. The trouble was that there seemed little alternative to this presentation the text shared the actors' facetiousness, and sneered at mediocrity in a way that is itself embarrassingly mediocre.
      But then the cast, and the text, performed an aeroplane take-off into another sphere. Not all the cast the acting was very uneven. Some characters, Zawe Ashton as Daisy and Michael Begley as the Logician, remained caricatured and superficial. Benedict Cumberbatch as Berenger, Jasper Britton as Jean, and Lloyd Hutchinson as Botard, however, lifted the performance as a whole. It was amazing, in fact, that the inevitable, anticipated metamorphosis of Jean into a rhinosceros was genuinely, freshly terrifying. The set, designed by Anthony Ward, was magnificent in its progress from pine-slatted blandness to shattered, punched-through chaos, and the off-stage sound-effects of trumpeting, rampaging rhinos were extraordinarily convincing and suggestive. The production captured perfectly the mixture of ludicrousness and horror that 'absurdity' involves.
      Just as fresh and fascinating was the play itself, which, as it gathered momentum, proved undated and immortal. The standard interpretation is that Ionesco was delineating the capitulation of ordinary French people to the herd mentality of Fascism during the Nazi occupation. He probably was doing so, but, like any great art, Rhinoceros rises above the specific and the temporal, and avoids dogmatic or easy moralising. Hard to tell how much it was the original French, this particular translation, or this particular production, but it was as if Ionesco were writing for 2007. The herd mentality he lampooned was certainly the pellmell slip to racism (in the thirties, the fifties and now), but he also seemed somehow to mock our own current conformism in kowtowing to political correctness, relativism and multi-culturalism. Berenger desperately tries to work out which of the other characters will capitulate to rhinohood, and what the catalyst is for this capitulation, and the audience is drawn into his bewilderment. Is it a particular set of beliefs that promotes rhinoceritis, or any set if expressed in cliché, catchwords, post-it-note patness? Not surprisingly Monsieur Papillon, the capitalist boss, has gone over, but Berenger hopes that the Marxist Botard, who sternly beats the anti-racism drum, may stand fast. Yet Botard is a self-righteous sloganeer, and given to category-discriminations despite his pious trumpetings; he too turns rhino, even if he is not one of the first.
      What Rhinoceros seems tellingly to query is whether discrimation is intrinsically the dirty thing it now seems to be regarded as. Ionesco shows its danger in certain contexts - permanently silly and wrong in the case of skin colour, wrong when pedantry distracts from the essential danger, as with the characters' protracted quibbling over whether the rhinos have one horn or two, are Asiatic or African. But he is far more ambiguous when it comes to the distinction between humans and rhinos. Is that a case where discrimination should be censured? The play is always read as saying no, as applauding Berenger for his lone stand on behalf of humanity against bestiality, but is it?
      You can do a duck/rabbit with many of Berenger's arguments, depending on what you slot into the rhinoceros symbol. He could be read as culturally or racially elitist if the analogy is Western norms and cultures against others. Equally, the other characters may be seen as on the side of the good because defending anti-racism and because making a plea against conformity and repression for naturalness and spontaneity. Their tolerance tips them into rhinohood. Are we supposed to agree with them against Berenger?
      During his transformation, Jean puts forward the non-discrimination argument. 'After all, rhinoceroses are living creatures just like we are, with exactly the same right to lead their own lives.' To which Berenger replies 'Provided they don't destroy ours in the process. Can't you see it's a different mentality.' Jean responds with holier-than-thou relativism: 'What, so you think ours is better?' (How familiar is that as a last-ditch scotcher of discrimination!) And when Berenger insists on moral values and that these are incompatible with rhino mores, Jean pooh-poohs moral values and urges the need to 'go beyond' them. Nature and nature's laws, he says, can replace them; anyway, 'moral values are anti-nature' (another sort of post-Romantic slogan, which we, as well as the Nazis, are fond of). Daisy rebukes Berenger for calling the rhinoceroses ugly, for denying they have a language (how do you know, asks Daisy), for refusing to call their trumpeting 'singing' and their movements 'dancing'. She and Dudard each argue that values are non-absolute, that it is impossible to know what is right or wrong. 'Think come on', urges Berenger, 'surely you realise we've got a philosophy these animals don't gave an irreplaceable system of values. Built up over centuries of human civilisation …'. Naughty Berenger, is he praising the Enlightenment?
      Rhinoceros is full of ambiguities and ambivalence, but it seems both immemorially relevant, and relevant right now.
Jane O'Grady