The lights are on, but nobody’s home at the start of kilted director Murat Daltaban’s terrific production of Rhinoceros, wonderfully adapted from Eugene Ionesco’s modern classic by Zinnie Harris, as the audience bathes in the same warm glow as Tom Piper’s expansive set of three white walls which stretch from what a joiner friend calls “the hair to the flair” as opposed to “the neck to the deck” (his way of differentiating between thinking and manual work).

Then a moustachioed waitress (Natalie Arle-Toyne who doubles as Mrs Boeuf) marches into Peter Brook’s “empty space”, which is as wide and square as a military parade ground, to arrange an army of hard-backed chairs into a regimental rank with a fastidiousness which would put Adolf Hitler (wonderfully parodied by the ever-excellent Myra McFadyen) to shame.

But to no avail. For by the end of the play they are suspended in the air like a foetus in a jar of formaldehyde and tossed on their backs like the corpse of an endangered species gunned down for their prized tusks by gung-ho game hunters such as Trump “I’m a hunter, for that I make no apologies” Junior.

Unlike the titular beasts which over the course of an uninterrupted and rapid-fire hour and forty minutes of comical absurdity swell in numbers from a solitary rogue to an abomination of “green gremlins” (think Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” and to a lesser extent Gordon Brown’s “bigoted woman”) which rampage through the streets in search of a target to gore with their humungous horns. The primary one being “to replace morality with the law of the jungle”.

But one man stands strong, albeit alone (the excellent Robert Jack as the disillusioned everyman Berenger), while the rest morph into thick-skinned animals after falling prey to group-think and the tidal wave of populism driven by empty slogans such as the Orwellian-inspired one horn good, two horns bad in reference to immigrants and “the other”.

One by one they fall, including Berenger’s best friend (Steven McNicoll in sparkling form as the full to the “vim” Jean), his girlfriend Daisy (a radiant Jessica Hardwick) and a “professional logician” (Harry Ward who handles the complexities of reducing philosophical conundrums to pithy one-liners with as much ease and success as Harry Houdini escaping from a straitjacket).

“How is this even possible in a civilised country?” asks the staunch trade unionist Botard (Sally Reid who doubles as a bolshy grocer). Look no further than the rise of The Donald, the Far Right in Europe and closer to home Farage and his fellow Little Englanders who built their fleeting success (not to mention inordinate appearances on mainstream political shows such as Question Time) on the backs of demonising muslims, immigrants and “bad hombres” aka Johnny Foreigner.

What starts off as politics with a small “p” crescendos into politics with a big “P” (not to mention “taking the p”) as Berenger howls to the moon “I will not change” from atop a shrunken stage framed within an ever decreasing proscenium arch. But is it the cry of a social democrat refusing to compromise his liberal beliefs in a fairer, more equal society for the many, not the few? Or is it the cry of a late convert to the cause of all for one and one for oneself-ism?

An enigmatic ending to a blisteringly funny and imaginatively staged narrative, bolstered by a scintillating live score by Oguz Kaplangi (a mish-mash of sirens and nature, arabic and funk) and an arresting lighting design by Chris Davey, which matches Jean’s tongue-in-cheek description of the latest play at the Lyceum which he instructs Berenger to watch on the grounds that it is “a 5 star show, go see”. What he said!

Peter Callaghan
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