Zinnie Harris’s adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in this Spinning Plates production at fortyfivedownstairs, opens on a sombre wasteland setting, bathed in eerie yellow light. In a sudden blaze of colour, a raucous rabble of ordinary characters, rendered extraordinary by Dann Barber’s bold and anarchic costumes, invades the stage. The energy is starkly at odds with Jacob Battista and Dann Barber’s superbly contained and claustrophobic staging. From this heightened theatrical world – part pantomime, part circus – we brace for a wild ride.

Harris has been lauded for her adaptations and reinterpretations of female characters in the English theatre canon. These include Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Strinberg’s Miss Julie, and Macbeth (recently staged by Malthouse). Harris’s adaptation of Ionesco’s classic, first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017, maintains the play’s essence: to investigate what happens when people and societies change beyond recognition.

From the outset, director Cassandra Fumi’s tight control of the action – a wild mash of pantomime, burlesque, and meticulous ensemble work – is pitch-perfect. The production’s dynamic symbiosis between direction, staging, and performance dramatises change and places us in a world of heady instability. The dazzling colour of a Sunday street becomes the pallid grey of Monday’s office. Frenzied shock and violence are stilled by the quiet tick of a metronome. Repressed carnality is liberated on the back of a quadruped, and a man metamorphises into a beast. ‘There is no god here,’ the director’s notes tell us. Not even Belinda Anderson-Hunt’s star turn as The Housewife can save her cruelly trampled cat.

John Marc Desengano as The Logician (photograph by Darren Gill)

The world straddles dream and nightmare, pairing comedic wordplay (fun with repetition, semantics, and running gags) with human fallibility, a grotesque rendering of our absurd, blustering, egocentric selves – all complemented by Rachel Burke’s ethereal lighting and Rachel Lewindon’s magical, action-movie sound design.

While these moments of orchestrated madness are wonderfully dynamic and highlight some exceptional performances (especially John Marc Desengano’s mesmerising Logician and James Cerche’s extraordinary on-stage transmogrification to pachyderm), together with an exemplary command of stagecraft, the plight of the everyman, humanity itself, is not so clearly realised.

Consistent with the pantomime/commedia dell’arte interpretation, Berenger, the hero of the play, is cast as Pierrot. While Pierrot and Berenger share many characteristics (both are melancholic, isolated and struggling), the sad, blank stare of painted Pierrot eyes and face make Berenger difficult to read. There is little evidence of his compassion, his defiance, his sense of guilt or dread. His belief in humanity, in resistance, feels tenuous. The paradox, that a ‘good person’ might easily succumb to prevailing fads or orthodoxies, is similarly ambiguous.

Berenger’s excessive unkemptness, an extravagant flip side of Jean’s early sartorial certainty, suggests that he is defeated from the beginning. Thus the sense of him as an obdurate outsider, the human character at the heart of this play, is diminished. Berenger’s fear, his courage, his love for Daisy and his friend Jean, together with his tenacious non-conformity, are rolled into a bleak stare into the abyss. Moments of levity sporadically counterbalance this, but while Cait Spiker’s performance as an oneiric, alienated clown is subtle and moving, it struggles to resonate at a broader level, to convincingly create an archetype of the everyperson in the street.

Berenger is a complex, inconsistent character, but this inconsistency is not at odds with his conviction. His wavering confirms his humanity. It casts him as the imperfect creature he is, one who remains in a moral morass but is not defeated. Through the courage to remain human he wins, both for himself and for us. Despite this, as the play progresses, there is little sense of what is really at stake. The urgency, especially that dramatised through the fraught relationship between Berenger and Jean, is oddly lacking.

Rhinoceroses plunder the village. They roam the streets, take over essential services, the politicians, the airwaves, our way of life. The world is moving too fast to keep up with. If this scenario sounds familiar, it is supposed to be, yet this central metaphor feels conscripted to the present, rather than being born of it. Are we in the grip of some anti-logical suppression or something harder to define?

If this play isn’t a call to arms, it ought at least to make us wonder what this new world will look like. To this end, the terror the rhinoceroses pose for the villagers and their way of life is subsumed by the theatrical rather than flourishing from it. Although the first sighting of the rhinoceroses is a comically alarming combination of sound and light play, one that heralds something strange but titillating, this insinuated socio/philosophical skewering slackens as the play continues. The intention may be to convey how quickly we humans are inured to terror, but I anticipated a more escalating menace.

While we see rhinoceroses at our doorsteps, tearing down our staircases, plundering our lives, there was little to suggest the true consequences of this invasion; that our basic freedoms may be endangered; that such creatures not only pose a threat to our civility but to our survival. The dread, the fear, the existential implications of the play are alluded to but not fully realised. As the characters, one by one, are seduced by the call of the ‘wild’, there is little sense as to why they succumb or what this may augur. The pull of nature is a repeated explanation, and comic scapegoat, but this does not tackle the trepidation of twenty-first century preoccupations one might have expected from Harris’s adaptation.

At the play’s end, Harris recasts Ionesco’s passionate rhinoceroses as sexy. This not only points to the ease with which we humans are duped but also to our need for excitement as much as acceptance. The desire to hang out with the gang, be part of the fun, overcomes our moral qualms – ultimately, even eclipses our humanity.

Berenger is the last man standing. We want him to retain, no matter the cost, his humanness. He does so – but somehow this doesn’t feel as significant as it should.

Rhinoceros (Spinning Plates) continues at fortyfivedownstairs until 17 November 2024. Performance attended: November 1.