Rhinoceros (play)

Rhinoceros (French original title Rhinocéros) is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. The play was included in Martin Esslin's study of post-war avant garde drama, "The Theatre of the Absurd", although scholars have also rejected this label as too interpretatively narrow. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses. The play is often read as a response and criticism to the sudden upsurge of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism during the events preceding World War II, and explores the themes of conformity, culture, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy and morality.

The play starts in the town square of a small provincial French village. Two friends – the eloquent, intellectual but incredibly prideful Jean, and the simplistic, shy, kind-hearted drunkard Bérenger – meet up in a coffee house to talk about an unspecified urgent matter. Instead of talking about what they were supposed to, Jean becomes furious at Bérenger's tardiness and drunken state and berates him until a rhinoceros rampages across the square, considerably startling the people there. The people there begin to discuss what has happened when another rhinoceros appears and crushes a woman's cat. This generates incredible outrage and people begin to band together to argue that the presence of these rhinos should not be allowed. The beginning of a mass movement is seen on stage.

Bérenger arrives late for work at the local newspaper office, but the newspaper's receptionist Daisy (with whom Bérenger is in love), covers for him. At the office, an argument has broken out between the sensitive and logical Dudard and the violent, temperamental Botard; since Botard does not believe a rhinoceros could actually appear in France despite all the claims by eyewitnesses that one did.

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