Writer Zinnie Harris is the main event at this year's Edinburgh International Festival, penning a trio of new shows to run over the course of August.
This is a pretty underwhelming start, though, a wishy-washy adaptation of Ionesco’s absurdist classic ‘Rhinoceros’ that feels rambling and indistinct. If it's defined by anything it's the dated surrealist humour, with Harris's most memorable innovation some groan-inducingly knowing gags about protagonist Berenger visiting the EIF.
It’s a shame because Ionesco’s play should have real heft in 2017. It concerns a small town whose inhabitants are slowly turning into rhinos, to the mounting horror of its shambolic hero Berenger. Written in 1959, it served as a satire on social conformism and the rise of totalitarianism. Communist Romania was the original inspiration, but it could work as a metaphor for everything from Brexit to Trump to the general current global rise in totalitarianism – not least in Turkey, where co-producers DOT Theatre hail.
Clearly director Murat Daltaban has the right to approach the production any way he wants, but his production and Harris’s text plays up the of-its-time comedy and minimises the politics in what seems like a wasted opportunity. Essentially that leaves you with two solid, interval-free hours of Robert Jack’s Berenger getting into scrapes, in a performance that that gets markedly more irritating the more sorry for himself Berenger feels.
You might reasonably argue that ‘Rhinoceros’ doesn’t need to be spelled out – you’re hardly going to miss the modern parallels, and clearly Ionesco didn’t intend it to be too on-the-nose. But that was then; this is now, and Harris’s ‘Rhinoceros’ feels de-horned, mooching when it should stampede.
