Rhinoceros from Paris

Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist satire, Rhinocéros, is a play deeply imprinted in my mind because the power of the demagogue to persuade the populace and change the political climate of a society that the play demonstrates is all too real to me who grew up in wartime Japan.  When I read it, I was totally convinced of its allusion to Nazism though it was written in 1959, long after its spread in Europe.  I also found the play visually concrete though it is heavily verbal in writing and for this reason chillingly vivid in my memory that I was convinced I had seen it produced on stage sometime somewhere. But I could not find it in my record, TheatreLog.  So, the production of Rhinoceros by Le théâtre de la Ville from Paris, performed at BAM early in October, was new to me, and it struck me as a lively show, more a spectacle than a literary drama, in the hands of the director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota,  Throughout the play, Ionesco’s characteristic verbal acrobatics was noticeably played down, perhaps wisely to make it easier for the audience to capture the sense.  In the scene of the town square in Act I, the web of overlapping repetitive dialogues were markedly edited down, especially the exhilarating parroting of the lines in two simultaneously delivered conversations.  Then, for the turmoil of the townspeople at the approaching roar of a stampede off-stage the chorus of haphazard exclamations is replaced more summarily by the crowd’s collective surge from one end of the stage to the other, beautifully choreographed  for sure and visually effective.  In Act II, the visual corollary of the vertiginously confused arguments is overwrought in the partial collapse of the scaffolded office set that seem to fling the office workers metaphorically off onto the herd of rhinoceroses.  The menacing masks of the animals that line up behind the actors in Act III, again threatening as a spectacle, make Ionesco’s metaphysics a bit too melodramatic.  All the actors were very good but Serge Maggiani was superb in portraying Bérenger both in manipulating his body and and his lines, so that the prelude, added by the director, in front of a scrim downstage where he speaks a monologue about his innate defeatism was perhaps redundant.  Hugues Quester as Jean, also good, was a bit too much of a bully but perhaps appropriately since he is the first to become a rhinoceros.  The rare occasion of hearing French beautifully spoken on stage was a special pleasure.