Rhinoceros
Royal Court, London
WHAT is truly contemporary? The mission of the Royal Court has always been to stage new plays as if they were classics and classics as if they were new plays. But artistic director Dominic Cooke’s new version of Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist masterpiece, Rhinoceros, is a classic which, sadly, has been staged as, well, a classic – and the result feels like a hopelessly unchallenging evening.
Still, for once, you can’t blame the writer. Having originally staged the play in 1960, with a cast that included Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, the Royal Court should be the ideal venue to make this satirical piece about social conformity relevant to us today. After all, the story certainly has potential: in a sleepy French town, the inhabitants gradually wake up to the fact that people are turning into rhinoceroses. At first, the rumbling, baying animals are the exception and perhaps an aberration, but soon they become the ruling species and humans the abnormal ones.
The town’s good citizens greet the rhino invasion with disbelief, scepticism, a dash of prejudice, then with resigned acceptance and finally with enthusiasm, except for one of them. This is the office-worker, Berenger, who finds that his conscience won’t allow him to embrace the alien invaders. Although he loves a tipple a bit too much to be a respectable member of society, he finally decides that enough is enough and he can’t join the inhuman herd.
As a metaphor for the way normal human beings can readily embrace inhuman ideologies such as Nazism or communism, Ionesco’s play now feels a bit old-fashioned. After all, the greatest danger these days is surely not so much the simple conformity that seemed to make the post-war world of mass society such a grey place, but other forms of beastliness. Besides, conformity nowadays is not expressed so much in terms of a shared ideology as in a shared adoration of celebrity, media and consumer toys.
But the real problem with this Rhinoceros, which is such a highly metaphorical play, is that Cooke stages it literally as the beasts rampage, the set is gradually destroyed and rhinos appear here, there and everywhere. This is quite good fun, until you realise that it simply lets the audience off the hook. The play’s French provincial setting, old-fashioned frocks and suits and general air of 1950s’ lassitude all argue powerfully against its contemporary relevance.
Despite fine performances, with the ever-personable Benedict Cumberbatch as Berenger and good support, especially from Jasper Britton as his mate Jean, Lloyd Hutchinson as a trade unionist and Zawe Ashton as Berenger’s sweetheart Daisy, the play is curiously lame and unaffecting. About the only insight on offer is the fact that nowadays everyone is a Berenger – everyone thinks they are unique individuals who stick out from the crowd.
Watching Cooke’s production, however, leads inexorably to the idea that the biggest problem affecting British new writing is not so much the playwrights – Martin Crimp’s translation of his hero, Ioensco, is arch, witty and fresh – but the directors. Where are the directors who can make an old classic such as this relevant to us? It’s not hard to see how this could be done: strip away all that boring history and set it in the present. Create references to Posh and Becks, Big Brother and Britney Spears. That’s the way to attack our present conformity and cretinism. Instead, Cooke’s road leads to nowhere.
Aleks Sierz
