Rhinoceros excites, forces one to reflect, frightens, induces laughter, but also helps formulate the right questions. This is so because, at times, the future is most clear by peeking back into history itself. Today as well this play by Ionesco is welcome on every stage and reaches our ears with ease, ears which are well-tuned to understanding it. When we look around us, what we see is a flood of meaningless words, dangerous stances, prejudices, all sorts of spectres, radical behaviour… With that transparent personal case he spoke honestly of ideological contamination – something more than familiar to us all as we live in an era of general, mental and spiritual pollution. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis served as a source of inspiration to Ionesco, as well as his personal internal conflict with the birth of Nazism at the time as an individual. Today that takes the form of the passive dictatorship that is raising one’s arms in chorus, a sort of demotatorship which is but a parody of what democracy really signifies and means. So absurd a situation unambiguously reveals itself to be a metaphor about conformism and relativism which, erasing the lines between good and evil, generate fertile ground for the totalitarianisms of all sorts, that is to say any kind or form of government which seeks to stifle the freedom of thought.
In a small provincial town a hitherto unknown epidemic is decimating the population, turning the unfortunately infected into – rhinoceroses.
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