Allow Me to Introduce Myself: My Name Is Behringer. Or Is It Tannhäuser?

At the Schauspielhaus in Graz, menacing beasts stomp across the stage. Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” staged by Ulrike Arnold, may feature creatures only faintly recognisable as such. Their menace and their allure, however, carry clearly across the footlights and nip any laughter in the bud.

Eugène Ionesco was a sharp observer of society who registered, like a seismograph, the social changes before, during and after the Second World War. His ‘Rhinoceros’ is frequently given the label ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. In fact, its subtext is anything but absurd.

Plays that seem simple and shallow at first glance usually have a false bottom when they come from good writers. Ionesco’s play, for which Franziska Bornkamm designed the set and Anna Lechner the costumes at the Grazer Schauspielhaus, has just such a false bottom. Whether there is a single sentence in this play that does not carry a meta-level within it would need to be checked. It certainly feels as though there is none. With the rhinoceros metaphor, Ionesco describes how a society transforms, bit by bit, into something it initially recognises clearly and distinctly as a threat. This ‘something’ is nothing abstract. Rather, it is the people themselves who – partly out of fear or opportunism, but partly also because they have been seduced – turn into creatures that threaten those who refuse to transform.

In this production, the grey plastic sacks in all manner of sizes and shapes, inflated or used as solid balls, are slammed against the walls with frightening noise. As the action unfolds, they fill the stage more and more and invade private spaces, so that even there one is left with barely any air to breathe. While at first one can still laugh at this carry-on, the laughter grows ever quieter as one character after another, under the most varied of pretexts, turns into a rhinoceros. During the very first transformation visible on stage – that of Mrs. Ochs, who wants to follow her husband, already mutated into a rhinoceros – Wagner’s Tannhäuser theme rings out, to be taken up once more later on. Otiti Engelhardt glides gracefully over and under the grey plastic monstrosity, following a theatrically conceived choreography. The audience’s reaction is divided. Some in the auditorium laugh out loud, while others are visibly uneasy at this scene.

The Wagner underscoring is pregnant with meaning. For with it, it suddenly becomes clear that the main character – Mr. Behringer, the only person who holds firm to the very end and refuses to be transformed – is being compared to Tannhäuser. That minstrel who likewise had to choose between two different worlds.

For long stretches, Sebastian Schindegger plays Mr. Behringer calmly, even submissively towards his friend Hans. Only when he confesses his love to Daisy, his work colleague in this production, does he truly come out of his shell. Franz Solar, Oliver Chomik and Otiti Engelhardt each have several roles to master. All of them are wonderful, with changes of costume and make-up which, thanks to the use of some at times grotesque wigs, can genuinely be perceived as humorous.

At the outset, the director sets the action in the cool hall of a temple of consumption. It also houses a small-animal veterinary practice, to which a cat owner (Franz Solar) anxiously brings his cat again and again. The open-plan office, where a heated argument breaks out over the appearance of the rhinoceroses after one has trampled a cat, appears in the following scene and makes it plain that the rhinoceroses are spreading in the here and now. The isolation in which people live is laid bare by the miniature dwellings of Hans and Mr. Behringer. The men inhabit these inhospitable spaces in isolation, penned in as if in a cage, incapable of living in them joyfully. The cool look of the stage also mirrors the human coldness that spreads like a virus until it has gripped almost everyone.

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Thomas Kramer plays Behringer’s know-it-all friend, who, through his transformation, quite deliberately turns away from him. To him, the rhinoceroses are more natural than the social constructs of humans, even though they lack any morality – or perhaps precisely because of that. As always, the ensemble at the Schauspielhaus is in top form. Everyone performs with great authenticity, even though the text, ranging from the trivial to the profound, offers just about everything imaginable.

The message that resonates in our present day is loud and clear, even if it is not stated explicitly. A regime that seduces people ends in enforced conformity. The individual cannot escape this pull and is ultimately left completely by the wayside. Opponents or opportunists, fellow travellers or fanatics – in a setting like this there are no winners, only losers.