Jean is at first against it, then more lenient. They argue once more, this time about whether people can transform into rhinoceroses and then about the morality of such a change. The office workers escape through a window.īérenger visits Jean in order to apologize for the previous day's argument. Despite a warning, she joins him by jumping down the stairwell onto her husband’s back. Bœuf recognizes the rhinoceros as her husband, transformed.

A rhinoceros arrives and destroys the staircase that leads out of the office, trapping all the workers inside. Botard scoffs at the so-called 'rhinoceritis' movement and says that the local people are too intelligent to be swayed by empty rhetoric.

Bœuf (the wife of an employee) says that her husband is unwell and that she was chased all the way to the office by a rhinoceros. The latter does not believe a rhinoceros could appear in France. At the office, an argument has broken out between sensitive and logical Dudard and the violent, temperamental Botard. Daisy, the receptionist, with whom Bérenger is in love, covers for him by sneaking him a time sheet.

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.

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