RHINOCEROS
Royal
Court Theatre, London SW1
Opened 27 September, 2007
****
Periodically during the Royal Court's revival of Eugène
Ionesco's 1959 Absurdist classic, a rumbling, thundering noise is
heard. Sometimes this is sound designer Ian Dickinson's indication of
the trampling herd of pachyderms offstage; sometimes it is a Circle
Line Tube train passing a few subterranean feet away. I cannot believe
that the aural similarity was not noticed and approved of by director
Dominic Cooke: any everyday sound might herald the beginning of an
unsettling stampede.
The play, in which protagonist Bérenger grows increasingly
distressed as the inhabitants of his town turn into rhinoceroses, is
usually read as an indictment of Nazism or more specifically of the
mass psychology that tolerated its rise; its programming here
corroborates that view. (It is shortly to be joined in repertoire by
Max Frisch's Absurd anti-Nazi parable The
Arsonists.) But it can be read in relation to any spreading
social or cultural meme: from anti-paedophile witch-hunts to Celebrity Big Brother, from fascism
to Facebook. One could interpret it as applying to either side of the
War on Terror, or equally to both... but that would be to engage in the
moral relativism which the play also condemns in the character of
Dudard (a fine performance by Paul Chahidi), whose even-handed,
thoughtful approach leads just as surely to acquiescence and big horns.
Martin Crimp's new version is characteristically precise, with subtle
deployments of both clichéd turns of phrase and higher-flown
ludicrousness such as "I do not deny the rhinocerotic facts". Anthony
Ward's design mixes obvious touches (we can immediately guess that that
back wall of planking will eventually be splintered) with gorgeous
ones: the rhino masks and figures themselves are more realistic than I
have ever seen in a production of the play. When Jasper Britton's Jean
(whose body language has been gradually, gloriously transforming
throughout the scene) disappears into the bathroom and a rather larger
figure emerges, the moment has all the beauty as well as all the brute
presence of Dürer's woodcut of a rhino. Benedict Cumberbatch as
Bérenger works up over two and a half hours from his more usual
relaxation to an exhilaratingly against-type agitation; the supporting
cast includes the likes of Jacqueline Defferary and Lloyd Hutchinson,
who no doubt will have larger roles in the partner production.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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