There is no more significant work of theatre for 2026 than Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, director Joe Woodward tells arts editor HELEN MUSA.

What is a rhinoceros? a large, thick-skinned, herbivorous odd-toed, one or two-horned ungulate, the dictionary says, but to Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco, the animal was something far more worrying.

“There is no more significant work of theatre for 2026 than Ionesco’s Rhinoceros,” says director Joe Woodward.

“It’s challenging, it’s comic, it’s devastating – but don’t let that deter you. It’s the play for our time.”

First performed in 1960, is usually grouped under the banner of the Theatre of the Absurd, a label Ionesco himself resisted. Rather than being absurd, he saw his work as revealing a world out of balance, where the familiar becomes strange.

That strangeness is central to Rhinoceros. In a dull French town, people begin transforming into rhinoceroses, which for Ionesco possibly represented the spread of totalitarian thinking, a force that is both horrifying and disturbingly seductive.

But Woodward doubts the play is about totalitarianism. Rather, he says, “It’s about how people see things,” pointing to some obvious parallel in contemporary Australian and world politics.

“What begins as shocking becomes accepted, then admired.”

At first it’s considered nothing much by the bystanders. 

“Oh, a rhinoceros” and “Well, of all things” people exclaim over and over again as they watch the pachyderms invade the street, but as the play proceeds, the parade of rhinoceroses becomes a universal conga line.

Woodward, who is staging the play with students in the Daramalan Theatre Company, has been thinking about directing it for over a decade. 

“At first I considered writing a play about people putting on Rhinoceros, using actors like Christopher Carroll,” he says, “but eventually I realised the original still says everything.”

Turning humans into rhinoceroses on stage led to early experiments with puppetry and eventually to the use of masks, inspired by those in Free-Rain Theatre’s recent production of Equus. 

To be sure, the demanding, highly verbal script filled with Ionesco’s lacerating satire of French intellectuals is top-heavy with polemic that needed tightening.

But even after that, it has demanded rapid-fire dialogue delivered trippingly off the tongue, as Hamlet prescribed, almost like a stylised film noir speech pattern, he says.

Cast members have recently been studying “isms”, the terms people apply to put ideas into pigeonholes, but that won’t get you far in Woodward’s view.

“An actor still has to make his part truthful,” he says, “and the meaning of the play isn’t just in the words, it’s conveyed through visuals and actions.”

Early scenes in rehearsal have leant into physical comedy – slapstick, exaggerated movements, even actors leaping on to tables. But beneath the laughter lies something darker.

The story centres on Bérenger, an ordinary, apathetic office worker, though Woodward doesn’t believe he is an “everyman”. Dismissed as a scruffy loser or a whinger, (that’s what one Daramalan student called him) Bérenger turns out to be the last person resisting the transformation around him. 

As more characters succumb, the rhinoceroses become not just normal, but desirable. What first appears ugly grows strangely beautiful in the eyes of the crowd. This shift is most painful in the character of Daisy, Bérenger’s love interest, who chooses to join the herd.

Ironically, it is his very tendency to question and complain that becomes his greatest strength.

“I’m the last man left and I’m staying that way until the end,” Bérenger pleads for humanity as the play ends. 

Rhinoceros, Joe Woodward Theatre, Daramalan College, April 18-25.