Rhino is a bold, dazzling to the eye translation of Ionesco’s absurdist parable Rhinoceros to the stuttering, glitch-ridden world of 8-bit computer games, liberally laced with trademark Jacques Lecoq physicality.
Presented by Tinderbox, it proves an apt inclusion in the Belfast International Arts Festival at the city’s Lyric Theatre. A graduate of Lecoq’s École Internationale de théâtre in Paris, Rhino’s adapter and director, Patrick J O’Reilly, is arguably the most expressive advocate in Northern Irish theatre for European modes of theatre making.
Ionesco’s tale of a village whose inhabitants slowly transform into rhinoceroses—brutal, contagious avatars for the rise of fascism in his native Romania and adopted France in the 1930s—began as a short story that developed into a signature play that immediately offered a defining paradigm of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Its critique of the insidiousness of herd-like conformism to even the most debasing and violent of ideologies acquires new potency in an era of unregulated social media, of political cultism in the United States, at home and elsewhere, and of atrocities in Ukraine and Palestine.
Rhino carries itself with pressing, cautionary topicality. There is something subtly sinister in O’Reilly’s much-shortened adaptation (agreeably so, given Ionesco’s reliance on repetition to hammer home his point). More explicit is his appropriation of 1980s video-games that proved curiously addictive despite their obvious shortcomings.
We are suddenly in a contrarily new but all too familiar world in which Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone meets the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, and where notions of reality depend on mere hearsay and unreliable algorithms to redefine the truth.
What results is a knowing and provocative experience, enthusiastically communicated by a six-strong ensemble drawing on Lecoq’s inciteful invitation to individuality as they carve out their own distinctive physical quirks.
Only the sceptical last man standing, Berenger, played with mounting bewilderment by Richard Clements, stands alone from the increasingly hysterical herd. His fellow villagers, doubly succumbing to computer viruses and the contagion that transforms them into beasts, are vividly realised by Shaun Blaney’s suavely cocky Papillon, Daniel Cunningham’s blustering logician, Vicky Allen’s Daisy a Marilyn Monroe figure wrestling with profundities beyond her reach, Mary McGurk’s Dudard vainly struggling to interject common sense and compassion and Nicky Harley’s harridan Madame Boeuf, a cleaver-tongued butcher’s wife.
The evening’s success belongs, no less pointedly, to O’Reilly’s daring, highly original concept, and to the committed, full-on contributions of his design team. Rosie McClelland’s monochrome costumes artfully channel commedia dell’arte, Chaplin and Marcel Marceau; Tracey Lindsay’s Amstrad-green set design—four giant, moveable iPads framed within Mary Tumelty’s circus Big Top lighting of LED strip-lights and pulsing, blood-red obelisks; and Eoin Robinson’s video design, part The Matrix, part George Orwell’s 1984.
Especial mention, too, for Garth McConaghie’s pitch-perfect sound design that ushers in the audience and knowingly mimics 1980s video game soundtracks throughout the cartoonish but concentrated evening’s 70-minute playing time.
Nothing like Rhino has been seen on a Northern Irish stage before. It is a triumph for all concerned.