Rhinoceros

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

Something odd is happening to an otherwise pleasant and staid little French village. On the surface, everything seems normal. In a café one morning, Jean (Ciarán McCauley), a picture of careful grooming and straight living, lectures his friend Bérenger (Bob Kelly), a dishevelled, yawning, reprobate – in short, our kind of guy – on the benefits of a more edifying and cultured life. He offers his friend one of his spare ties and Bérenger, mildly repentant, even considers seeing a new Ionesco play.

But for all the steady verbiage of this exchange, the bonds of normality are already beginning to loosen. People are undergoing a transformation.

Out of nowhere, a rhinoceros stomps through the square, followed quickly by another, and in the spinning disarray of the crowd – here played with the giddy finesse of just four more role-switching performers – this parochial idyll begins a startling, inexorable metamorphosis . . . into a Blue Raincoat production.

Completing a trilogy of Ionesco’s works for the physical theatre company, director Niall Henry has chosen a piece that is spry with ideas but stodgy with text. Against the theatrically enlivening metaphor of villagers transforming, one by one, into rhinos, Ionesco’s counterbalance is a careful exposure of the perversion of logic, language and normalcy. John Carty’s logician performs syllogistic contortions with the truth, others get hung up on pedantic argument and refutation, and as rhinoceritis becomes an epidemic, the broadminded Dudard (Carty again) can’t see the wood for the trees: “What could be more natural than a rhinoceros?” Ionesco’s political parable works as a clear analogy for the rise of fascism, mindless communism or any unquestioning conformism – a point exuberantly understood by Nichola McEvilly as Ms Botard, succumbing offstage despite her spirited protestations, shortly after McCauley’s bravura transformation at the core of the play. Henry won’t force our reading, though: if these pachyderms stand for a more contemporary threat, he is reluctant to grab it by the horn(s).

Instead, the production becomes an exercise in style. Jamie Vartan’s set, a Spartan, crumpled façade that already looks well butted, reveals a gallery of bobbing rhinos popping out from windows like a zoological advent calendar, while Joe Hunt’s sound design, a stampede of electronic thuds, brings a musicality to the text which might have been still better varied.

Within this approach, it can be a challenge to lift the words of the translation, which, 52 years on, often feels as grey and leathery as hide.

You feel that drag in Ionesco’s wittiest scene, where Kelly and Sandra O’Malley condense 25 years of married life into five minutes, and while Henry is wise enough to put his rhinos onstage (Ionesco didn’t), surreal and haunting under Kevin Smith’s crepuscular lights, the production can only bring so much freshness to the play.

Finally, Bérenger is the last man standing, and in his defiance and resistance, he seems a model of both humanity and the independent spirit of Blue Raincoat’s theatricality: “I’m not capitulating!” Well, if you can’t join them, beat them.