9/10/26 update: I saw last night the 1974 film version, which was overall disappointing, featuring Gene Wilder, Karen Black and Zero Mostel. The period music, the whole hippie-ish vibe, was late sixties/early seventies anti-establishment, anti-conformity, the director playing a lot of the early scenes as slapstick comedy. He doesn't get the serious intent behind absurdism, a deep societal critique. Anti-conformity is a point of the play, but it is a much darker than this largely kooky film, as much as I normally like Gene Wilder, her playing The Last Man, after everyone else has become rhinoceroses.
The one brilliant aspect of the film is Zero Mostel's transformation into a rhinoceros, and trashing an apartment. Just amazing acting. Mostel "gets" absurdism, and gets the fact that this play is essentially about the people's consent to give into fascism. It's an anti-fascist play, not a flower power, stick-it-to-the-Man play. See the film for Mostel though, truly frightening, amazing.
8/26/26: “How can it be possible in a civilized country?!”
Time here to throw a little Theatre of the Absurd at fascism! Or, if you prefer, at “strong-man” authoritarianism? Connect the dots between our current crop, Putin, Bibi, Kim Jong Un, Modi, Orban and Trump to the last round, Stalin, Hitlerr, Mussolini, Franco, and so on. But it’s not just these men we need to look at, it is the tendency of humans to follow them, and adore them, and lay down their lives for them! Rhinoceros by Ionesco was first produced in 1959. The play is about our tendency to conformity, to bandwagons, and the various ways we give in to and rationalize fascism. The rhinoceros in this play represents the violent, bullying, braying image of fascism.
At the outset, two sets of people, Jean and Bergerer and an Old Man and a Logician are having drinks in a second-story cafe, arguing. The Logician is trying to teach a silly version of syllogism to the old man: These four cats are dead. Socrates is dead; therefore, Socrates is a Cat, and so on. Others come in and one sees a rhino roaring down the street.
The atmosphere is increasingly heightened and stylized absurdity as people see the rhino, or deny it if they haven’t seen it: Botard is the main denier of the reality of rhinos: ”your rhinoceros is a myth!” “Fear is an irrational thing! It must yield to reason.” The worry about rhinos is a collective psychosis.” “It’s an illusion.”“A hoax.” “You’re over-reacting."
Then when they have all finally seen rhinos, they get lost in side issues instead of being alarmed by it as they should: Does the rhino have one horn or two? Was there one rhino or two? A cat is killed--oh, no big deal, cats die every day. Later a man is gored by a rhino; not to worry, these things happen! It's just a few people, ignore it! [cf., Renee Gold and Alex Pretti murders]. A rhino destroys the staircase to the cafe; oh, it needed to be replaced, anyway. Let them destroy the street and create havoc, I’m going to live my own life! (cf., Germans, even Jewish Germans, in Berlin, trying to go along, initially, just to get along. It will end! Or: 47 will die at some point and this whole nightmare will be over, let's party!).
Then Jean contends that the rhino behavior is not a real concern: “Humanism is all washed up!” Don’t worry about the violence and trumpeting rhinos roaring down the street! “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a matter of personal preference.”
Then some people think it may be a disease, rhinoceritis, which can be cured or will go away, like the plague. But everyone they see from the balcony is now a rhino, and they’ve taken over the radio stations, and the fire station is knocked down. So it's a trend, we have to go with the times, let's be rhinoceroses!
The Last Man to resist is Berenger, who makes one last effort to claim his love of Daisy as a kind of rescue. We can escape into love and shut out the world! Or (and this one is worrisome) we can together escape into art and beauty and ignore the chaos!
“I’m a human being! I’m not capitulating!”
A vast majority of eligible citizens voted Hitler and Trump in. Resist in any way you can.
Logic and reason and conformity are spoofed along the way. This is political humor along the lines of Antonin Artaud’s Ubu Roi, the theater of outrage, dark humor (which is one strategy in facing fascism Ionesco and American comedians agree on, to laugh, to darkly ridicule instead of merely screaming or despairing). It’s David Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense.” It has a touch of surrealism and Dada about it. It is in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s social satire, too. Is satire and absurdism sufficient to the day? No, but it's something.