Rhinoceros and Other Plays

by Eugène Ionesco

Overview

“With outrageous comedy” this classic of Absurdist drama “attacks the most serious subjects: blind conformity and totalitarianism, despair and death” (The New York Times).

In Rhinoceros, as in his other plays, Eugene Ionesco startles audiences with a world that invariably erupts in explosive laughter and nightmare anxiety. A rhinoceros suddenly appears in a small town, tramping through its peaceful streets. Soon there are two, then three, until the “movement” is universal. This is not an invasion of wild animals, but a transformation of average citizens into beasts, as they learn to move with the times. As the curtain comes down, only one desperate man remains.

Rhinoceros is a commentary on the absurdity of the human condition made tolerable only by self-delusion. It shows us the struggle of the individual to maintain integrity and identity in a world where all others have succumbed to the “beauty” of brute force and mindlessness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802190758
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2020
Series:	Books That Changed the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	162
Sales rank:	433,413
File size:	2 MB

What People are Saying About This

Rosette C. Lamont

"[Ionesco was] the Moliere of the twentieth century. Like Moliere in his late plays, in Inesco's plays, there is a seamless amalgam of the comic and tragic." -- Rosette C. Lamont, author of Ionesco's Impreratives: The Politics of Culture