There aren’t many plays that leave you speechless as the actors take their final bow: still less that fully deserve a standing ovation. Rhinoceros is undoubtedly one of them. From the very first scene, with a chaos of white-faced comic French characters bouncing off each other and causing utter mayhem, the play same alive and held the audience in the palm of its hand – it was like being in the centre of a humorous Hadron Collider. Playing to a sold-out audience, Gruffdog Theatre created an electric show full of colour, action and laughter, employing everything from puppetry and live music to tunnels underneath the stage, with dance, masks and paint in between.
The humour of the initial first half was kept up throughout, with high energy fun woven throughout the piece that only lagged in the last few scenes. Though perhaps this was apt, as the play grew steadily darker and more onimous: as more and more of the townsfolk morphed into rhinoceroses, the boundary between right and wrong, and what is and isn’t ‘natural’, is blurred. The slow slip from carefree humour into a frightening world of metamorphoses where humans turn into rhinos leads to a stark and surprisingly dark ending of the play, with the lead protagonists Berenger and Daisy (brilliantly played by Jack Bradfield and Madeleine Walker respectively) left as the last humans in a threatening world of rhinos that seem more at home than he does on earth, jolting the audience out of any sense of security they might have had. But then again, this play is constantly playing with the audience – from the trapdoors that suddenly appear in the wonderfully cluttered and eye-catching staging to the incredible puppetry and guitar-violin duet that help with the smooth scene transitions. The sheer creativity in this play is staggering – during an office scene the fast-paced back-and-forth conversation is accompanied by the rhythmically musical beat of a typewriter, used as a drum-kit to drive the dialogue along.
The multitude of diverse, absorbing caricatures are a testament to the huge skills of these actors: from the stuffy ‘professional logician’ (Gaetano Ianetta) to the doddery old man (Oli Clayton) and the spectacular transformation scene of Jean into a rhino (Markus Kinght-Adams), the whole cast paint vivid characters with dexterity and flair. Special mention must go to the producer Conor Jordan and director Pete Sayer, whose incredible inventive theatrical devices helped the play to come alive. In what other play would a telephone be used as a fireman’s ladder to rescue office workers from a collapsed building?
In this absdurdist show full of humour and life, the cast successfully managed to pose searching questions of nature and normality whilst engaging and astounding the audience. What else could you ask for from a play?
