Details

In a sleepy French provincial town, a rhinoceros rampages across the market square. Another crushes someone's cat. A woman sounds the alarm: it is the townspeople themselves who are transforming into these raging beasts. As more and more of the citizens embrace their future as rhinos, just one man - the drunkard Berenger - refuses to transform. But why does he feel so out of step with everyone else? And what will his refusal to conform cost him? Eugene Ionesco's classic 1959 play is an uproarious absurdist farce - and a chilling examination of conformism, nationalism, fascism and fundamentalism that has been compared with Orwell's Animal Farm and Camus's The Plague. It considers the countless ways in which humans are content to adapt themselves to new and horrifying circumstances, and give in to poisonous ideologies. Alongside its piercing political insights, it is comic, thrillingly theatrical and deeply human, focusing on the unlikely hero of the everyman Berenger, and the possibility of resistance to what might seem inevitable.

Cast/Performers

Benedict Cumberbatch, Zawe Ashton, Michael Begley, Jasper Britton, Paul Chahidi, Jacqueline Defferary, David Hinton, Lloyd Hutchinson, Claire Prempeh, Alwyne Taylor, Graham Turner

Creatives/Company

Author: Eugene Ionesco
Corporate Sponsor: Coutts
Producer: Royal Court Theatre
Translation: Martin Crimp
Director(s): Dominic Cooke, Sue Lefton (movement)
Sound: Ian Dicksinson
Music: Gary Yershon
Design: Anthony Ward
Lighting: Johanna Town
Choreographer: Due Lefton