Rhinoseros review – absurdist fable gets a Welsh twist as villagers sling the mud

Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic warns that uncritical conformity leads to catastrophe, as one by one the residents of a small French town turn into horned rhinoceroses. Manon Steffan Ros’s Welsh-language adaptation transplants the action to a quiet Welsh village, and her programme note reminds us that the collective noun for a group of rhinoceroses is a crash. Both metaphorically and (muddily) literally, crashes come from all directions in Steffan Donnelly’s astute, lucid staging.
As Bérenger, the everyman who resists the transformation, Rhodri Meilir stands apart. Incongruently listless in a world that demands a little too much pep, his is a striking performance of understated physical delicacy, soft human sinews against the leathery roughness of animal skin. As Sian, Bethan Ellis Owen carries the play’s absurdist logic with aplomb; there’s nothing more unreasonable than reason.
Consisting of Dafydd Emyr, Ioan Gwyn, Priya Hall, Eddie Ladd, Glyn Pritchard and Victoria Pugh, this is luxury ensemble casting, and all are game. It feels novel to see Ladd cast in a play, but her physical performance – whether stepping over tables or as if violently turning herself inside out – is pivotal in expanding the production’s theatrical vocabulary.
And it is very theatrical. Impressively designed by Cai Dyfan and lit by Ceri James, with effective sound design by Dyfan Jones, it is technically ambitious and assuredly cohesive. As the first staging of a canonical European drama under Donnelly’s artistic stewardship of Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, this is a compelling and physically substantial stage work, and it is a fine production.
Steffan Ros’s deft adaptation is a real achievement. Faithful in spirit but richly idiomatic within the vernacular of its new setting, it succeeds at being specific to a place and time and yet unnervingly out of them, too. The inevitable metamorphosis of a polis into a crash feels terrifyingly close to home.