overview
Ionesco’s iconic satire on mindlessness and conformity is given its first major UK revival since its Royal Court premiere in 1960, which was directed by Orson Welles starring Laurence Olivier.
It happens inexplicably: One by one, a man's friends and neighbors turn into rhinoceroses, reducing the town to a perilous wasteland. In this brilliant restaging of Eugène Ionesco's absurdist allegory Rhinoceros, loneliness and horror consume the individual who resists a popular movement in which civilians succumb to the collective in its most monstrous, destructive form. Spare, physical, and haunting, celebrated French director Emmanuel Demarcy—Mota's internationally acclaimed staging teases out the archetypal quality of this classic work, whose fierce indictment of 20th-century totalitarianism retains its sting amid today's ideological climate.