Rhinoceros

Rhinoceros starts on a Sunday morning in a small town square, where a hungover clerk is being lectured about his drinking by a friend who has his life in order. A rhinoceros runs past. The two of them argue about whether it had one horn or two, and whether the question is worth pursuing.

By Monday there are more. People who were at their desks the previous week are not, and the ones who remain begin to find reasons why the change might be reasonable, then admirable, then overdue. Berenger, the clerk, keeps asking the obvious question and keeps being told that asking it is the real failure of manners. One by one the people around him stop being available to answer.

Eugene Ionesco wrote the play in 1959, drawing on what he had watched happen to friends and colleagues in the 1930s as fascism became first respectable and then general. He built it as absurd comedy rather than as argument: the horror arrives through farce, and the logic used to justify it is always presented as sensible.

The staging problem is the transformation itself, which happens on stage and is written to be performed rather than described. The central set piece is a long scene in which one man changes while another watches and tries to talk him out of it, and it is closer to slapstick than to tragedy for most of its length.

What survives is the last image: a man alone in a room, listening to a noise outside that everyone he knows is now making, deciding whether to keep refusing.