Fringe Festival: Idiopathic Ridiculopathy's ‘Rhinoceros’ (3rd review)

These facts are important because the characters in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros make a great to-do about whether the rhinoceros has one horn or two. They never resolve this question, which is important only because of its unimportance. If a herd of rhinos came barreling into your neighborhood, would the number of horns they had be the first thing on your mind? Only if you were a character in an Absurdist play, which in Ionesco you are.

Absurdist theater obviously owed much to Surrealism, but it was also a response to the postwar crisis of values reflected in Existentialism. Absurdism isn’t Existentialist, however — a point Ionesco himself insisted on. Existentialism is about personal autonomy and the responsibility of moral choice. Absurdism is about the impossibility of such choices. To make them, one must think clearly and use language with care and precision — French virtues above all. But Absurdist theater, which like Existentialism made its home primarily in France, is based on the critique of language. For the Absurdist playwright, the debasement of language was both the instrument and the consequence of totalitarianism. Its legacy was the subversion of the values inseparable from language itself.

A small French town

Perhaps the best guide to the postwar frame of mind is Diary of the Dark Years, the French critic Jean Guéhenno’s account of the German Occupation, which concerns itself obsessively with the destruction of language by Vichy propaganda. Unlike Sartre and Camus, Guéhenno refused to publish during the Occupation on the grounds that it would legitimate fascism. This was a principled stand, but one that also ceded the ground to the enemy. If language were left only to those who lied with it, what truth would then remain?

This was the question confronted by the Absurdist playwrights, Ionesco above all. The first step on the road to recovering language was to admit that it had been destroyed, that it was incapable of expressing either self-awareness or value — that it was, in effect, only a kind of chatter, or an animal barking and grunting. In Rhinoceros, Ionesco found the metaphor to express this condition.

The scene is a small French town whose residents are incapable of speaking reflectively but roar only bluster and cliché at top volume. They are surprised by the arrival of a rhinoceros, whose roar outshouts theirs, and which, doing what comes naturally, tramples whatever lies in its path.

Master race

The townspeople take no practical steps to deal with their peril, but fall to debating whether it has that second horn. It wouldn’t have taken a very sophisticated postwar theatergoer to make the connection to the French appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. The first rhinoceros is succeeded by another but, gradually, the good citizens themselves sprout horns and join the animal kingdom. The analogue here is of course to the acceptance by most Frenchmen of the Occupation as their new normal and the internalization of fascist command as voluntary behavior.

No intellectuals or resistance fighters reside in Ionesco’s town. Humanity is an outmoded concept, and the rhinoceros is the master race that all must join. This situation takes a little getting used to, but soon the townspeople feel repugnance at their pale, soft skin and puny bodies, and long for the hardness and strength of the rhino. At last, only two humans are left: the hapless Bérenger (Ethan Lipkin) — a name Ionesco uses, in different guises, as the Everyman in several of his plays— and Daisy (Kirsten Quinn), the girl he loves.

Bérenger is no hero and scarcely even a protagonist. He’s a very defective human being — weak-willed, insecure, easily browbeaten, and helplessly alcoholic. A vague kindliness is his only redeeming feature.

For these reasons, however, he is a poor candidate to become rhinocified. When the transformation fails to occur, Bérenger realizes that he may be the last man on Earth, and he proposes to Daisy that they repopulate the planet. But happy endings don’t exist in Ionesco’s playbook.

Force or farce?

Rhinoceros is a difficult play to stage because its characters are deliberately flat — inauthentic, in Existentialist jargon — and its dialogue banal. Banality, Ionesco notes, is “a symptom of non-communication,” and non-communication means, literally, the absence of community.

It was no accident that Vichy fascism represented itself above all as an appeal to the supposed unity of medieval society: Banality is perfected in propaganda, the art of the lie. It’s also awfully hard for actors to project, particularly American actors trained to “find” their character, come what may.

Director Tina Brock addresses this problem with fast-paced movement and rapid-fire delivery. This approach raises the volume of the dialogue, suggesting the ugliness of language used as a weapon. Ionesco’s townspeople talk at and past each other in a jabber of ego-assertion, for when people are not open to mutuality, the only communication is that of force. The effect, of course, is largely one of farce, because none of the good citizens is paying enough attention to one another to be intimidated.

Timid theater

The cast members of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, many of them veterans of the group’s previous productions, threw themselves into the proceedings with élan, and used a cramped stage space to advantage. We’re far from postwar Europe now, and the ghosts of fascism seem to have receded — though not as much as we would like to think, judging by recent European election results.

The Absurd remains relevant to us, not least because our own national conversation is so palsied and our theater so unadventurous. Ionesco again: “One can dare anything in the theater, and it is the place where one dares the least.” Not, happily, in this production, at least.

For a review by Alaina Mabaso, click here.

For a review by Carol Rocamora, click here.