Back a few weeks ago, I was watching a lot of Beckett on Film, and it turns out that I evidently never wrote a note wrapping up the series after finishing (or mostly finishing, as for some reason I am reluctant to watch Happy Days) but it was very powerful and interesting stuff. In particular, I wanted to go back to my shelf to look at some of the text of Waiting for Godot, and then there on the shelf next to it was Rhinoceros.
You know, for all that I think my high school drama teacher was ... really profoundly the wrong person for the job, she did hip me to the Absurd, in particular Eugene Ionesco. She particularly liked The Bald Soprano, which is funny in places but doesn’t (for me) pack a real wallop. My favorite, actually, is The Lesson, but I do like me some Rhinocerossess.
For anybody who hasn’t read it, and I can’t really imagine why anybody would have read it (or seen it, for that matter), Rhinoceros is about a zhlub or an office worker having yet another bad week, only this week starts off with a rhino in the town square, and pretty soon everybody is turning into rhinos. The bravura part is our main character’s buddy, played by Zero Mostel in New York (and in a film as well), who gets to slowly, gradually, turn into a rhinoceros. On stage. He was evidently beyond brilliant. At some point I’ll watch the filmed version, I suppose, but it won’t be the same.
The lead, however, does not turn into a rhino. He is a weak, vacillating little man who would rather like to give his ineffectual help to his friends and colleagues, only they will keep turning into rhinos, which seems, he thinks, to be a bit of a mistake, if they are doing it on purpose, and it’s so difficult to tell. He’s frightened of catching rhinoceritis, but then, perhaps they are better off. It’s hard to be sure. It’s so confusing, when all the people around you have turned to rhinos. But they are ugly brutes, aren’t they?
In the end, he realizes that he was wrong, and they were right. He wants to be normal, with a horn and rough skin, and have a proper bellowing voice rather than his weak piping. But it’s too late, it’s too late, and he’ll never be a rhino now.
This was Laurence Olivier in London in 1960, who evidently beyond brilliant. Does Lord Larry get the credit he deserves for moving with the times, and continuing to put on fresh theater rather than retreating to classics? His preeminence in Shakespeare was sufficient for two or three careers, and yet in 1953 he played in a new Terence Rattigan play, in 1957 a new John Osborne, and in 1960 a new Eugene Ionesco, all at a time when it would have been a major honor for a living playwright to have him appear in a production. That’s in addition to his work as founding director the National Theater, which he could have steered to Nuthin’ But Standards instead of advancing the careers of Peter Shaffer, John Mortimer, Tom Stoppard and John Arden, in addition to Michael Blakemore and Jonathan Miller. I mean, I’m not saying he’s the Patron Saint of the Avant-Garde, but he was willing to go pretty far outside what you’d have to consider his comfort zone.
Anyway, I was thinking that the translation I read, which was evidently the translation Baron Olivier used, was crap (sorry Derek Prouse) and that somebody really should pick the play up, do a really good job of translating and adapting it, and put the thing on now, whanging all the nerves on conformism, war fever and the end of the world, and really kick up a storm with it. And, like all my good ideas (and my bad ones, too, likely enough), somebody has already thought of it. It will get a Royal Court Theatre production this fall in what appears to be a translation by Martin Crimp, who seems like the right kind of guy for this.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.