Them - or us? An evergreen Rhinoceros | Mike Parker

We all have our cultural lodestars, those creators of books, films, poems, plays and music that have seduced us entirely.  We can often recall, with pinpoint precision, our first encounter with them, the moment a lifelong passion was born. Forty years ago, this happened for me with the work of Eugene Ionesco.

It began with La Cantatrice Chauve, his first and best-known play, which I was introduced to by a particularly cool French teacher at school in Worcestershire. Ionesco’s wordplay and anarchic wit hooked me immediately, swiftly followed by the sharpness of his caricature.  Weaned on a diet of stodgy Middle England classics, this glimpse into new worlds thrilled me. Ever since, whenever I’ve seen that a Ionesco play is being staged somewhere, I’ve gone to see it, and never once been disappointed.

Studying drama at London University, I staged a version of Rhinoceros for my finals assessment.  It wasn’t very good, though I loved getting to know the play better.  His satire of spreading societal conformism, of hardening skins and hardening minds, was born of Ionesco’s own youth in the early 1930s, when his family had returned from France to his father’s native Romania, and he’d witnessed first hand growing Nazism, particularly amongst his University contemporaries.  As he put it in a 1970 interview:

"From time to time, one of the group would come out and say ‘I don’t agree at all with them [the Fascists], to be sure, but on certain points, I must admit, for example the Jews ...’ And that kind of comment was a symptom.  Three weeks later, that person would become a Nazi.  He was caught in a mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a Rhinoceros."

My production was in 1989, peak Thatcher, and I nailed all my colours to that one mast.  In my keen and rather clumsy hands, Rhinoceros was a takedown of the propaganda of the British state, the right-wing press especially.  To underscore the point so heavily that no-one could possibly miss it, at key moments of the play, I projected front pages from The Sun and the Daily Mail across the back wall.  It was not subtle stuff.

Decades later, returning to the play, I find so many more textures.  The growing totalitarianism that Ionesco skewers came not just in the Romania of the 1930s, nor the Britain of the 1980s, but also in the France of the 1950s, when he was writing it, and this time from what was supposed to be the other side, the progressive intellectual left, turning wilfully blind eyes to the reality of Stalin and the Soviets.  It also nodded to the France of little more than a decade earlier; the grey-green skins of the rhinoceroses reminding many of the German uniforms that had so recently occupied their streets. 

This time, here, now, is ripe for Rhinoceros. It has been a crazy decade. From the Scottish independence referendum to today’s bloodbaths in Ukraine and Palestine/Israel, via Brexit, Trump, Covid and all, we have been hit by so many upsets, their polarising effects turbocharged by the rocket fuel of digital tech. For almost all of us, there have been casualties. We have seen colleagues, friends and family go to the dark side, lost in echo chambers and down rabbit holes, perhaps never to return.

The rhinoceroses are proliferating on all sides. We see it so clearly in others. But can we always see it in ourselves?

Mike Parker is a writer, based near Machynlleth. His On the Red Hill won the non-fiction Wales Book of the Year and was runner-up for the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing. His new book All the Wide Border explores the line between Wales and England on the map, through history and in our heads and hearts.