It’s Monday morning, and loud laughter is heard coming from the Royal Court’s main rehearsal room. Inside, eleven actors are reading through Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros. It’s the first day of rehearsals for Dominic Cooke’s new production of the 1959 play, and the first time that the play has been read by the company of actors who will be bringing Ionesco’s characters to life on the Royal Court stage. The read-through is thrilling: Martin Crimp’s new translation of the play is by turns funny and terrifying. The scene in which a rhinoceros runs over a cat goes down particularly well.
The morning begins with a question from the play’s director, Dominic Cooke: has Rhinoceros been “justly neglected” since its first major London production? What might the play mean for a contemporary audience? The play will be performed in repertoire with The Arsonists by Max Frisch. While both plays speak about politics in a highly metaphorical and theatrical way, Rhinoceros highlights what Ionesco called “the malady of conformity” by telling a story about a town overrun by rhinoceroses.
Dominic swiftly bans the word ‘absurd’ from rehearsals. The phrase ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was coined in the 1960s to describe a movement in drama that tended towards non-linear plots, minimal character psychology and unexpected theatrical metaphors. But while absurdism is based on the notion that life is meaningless, ends with a man vowing to “take on the whole wide world” in his struggle against conformity. Ionesco’s play, Dominic argues, is essentially humanist in conception – it might begin in despair but it ends by proclaiming the “value of human life”.
Dominic and Anthony Ward, the play’s designer, show the actors the model box. The set is breathtakingly simple: rather than faithfully reproducing a French town square, an office and a suburban bedroom, Anthony has designed an environment in which each of the play’s scenes can be situated. As the rhinoceroses cause more distress to the townspeople, the set will gradually break down, degenerate and collapse. Life-size rhinos, special effects and stage prosthetics all feature heavily in bringing the world of the play alive. Dominic talks the set through with the actors: although he had previously considered staging the play in a ‘black box’, relying on the actors’ physicality to illustrate the transformation between human and rhinoceros, he decided that “without real rhinos, we’d all feel a bit cheated”.
