This generates outrage and the villagers band together to argue that the presence of the rhinoceroses should not be allowed.īérenger arrives late for work at the local newspaper office. During the discussion that follows, a second rhinoceros appears and crushes a woman's cat.

Rather than talk about it, Jean berates Bérenger for his tardiness and drunkenness, until a rhinoceros rampages across the square, causing a commotion. They have met to discuss an unspecified but important matter. Two friends meet at a coffee shop: eloquent, intellectual and prideful Jean, and the simple, shy, kind-hearted drunkard Bérenger. The play starts in the town square of a small provincial French village. The play is often read as a response and criticism to the sudden upsurge of Fascism and Nazism during the events preceding World War II, and explores the themes of conformity, culture, fascism, responsibility, logic, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy and morality. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses. The play was included in Martin Esslin's study of post-war avant-garde drama The Theatre of the Absurd, although scholars have also rejected this label as too interpretatively narrow. Rhinoceros ( French: Rhinocéros) is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959.

Rhinocéros by Eugène Ionesco