Rhinoceros

Published Monday 1 October 2007 at 10:30 by Gerald Berkowitz

Ionesco’s dark satire on conformity and fascism is given a surprisingly and attractively light touch in Dominic Cooke’s staging of this new version by Martin Crimp. The opening scenes, introducing us to village eccentrics and their reactions to the sudden appearance of a rhinoceros in their midst, have the near fairy tale air of an Anouilh confection. And even as things get darker, text and production nimbly sidestep every trap of obviousness and heavy-handedness.

As the amiably hungover wastrel who will discover himself the last holdout against the infection, fad or cult of conversion from human to rhino, Benedict Cumberbatch depicts a man for whom ordinary life was puzzling enough, so that it is as much his inability to keep up with things as any strength of character that keeps him human. But by suggesting that a certain degree of bumbling is the essence of humanity, his performance and the production as a whole nicely make Ionesco’s political point that joining the herd is a violation of human and humane values.

Along the way, the play scores points off other -isms that offer too simplistic and therefore anti-humanist views of life, with Jasper Britton’s aesthete, Michael Begley’s logician, Paul Chahidi’s conciliatory liberal and Lloyd Hutchinson’s radical all effectively understated satirical caricatures, Britton enjoying the added challenge of transforming himself into a rhinoceros before our very eyes.