Date/Time
Date(s) - 28/08/2015 - 30/08/2015
7:00 pm

Location
Alliance Francaise de Bangalore

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THEATRE: Rhinoceros

3:30 pm& 7:00 pm | 28^th,29^th & 30^th of August | Alliance Française auditorium

In the tradition of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit,and Harold Pinter’s plays, Ionesco’s drama combines abstract philosophical ideas with concrete humor. The various rationalizations that characters come up with to explain their previous errors delight us with their silliness, but they also suggest deeper ideas about logic and responsibility. As many of the plays from the Theatre of the Absurd go, Rhinoceros is conscious of itself as a play, as when Jean suggests Berenger sees one of Ionesco’s plays, but more so in the ways that it forces the audience to recognize the production before them as a play and not as a diversion. A production with back-lit rhinoceros heads stakes no claim to the typical drama’s attempts to suspend the audience’s disbelief, but this is the point: Ionesco breaks the “fourth wall” of the theater (and numerous other walls and structures explode in the play) to make the audience leave the theater feeling that the absurdity they witnessed was somehow more real than a “realistic” play.

This play is a part of the Alliance française de Bangalore and Bangalore Little Theatre partnership.