Die Nashörner

In the organizer's words:

by Eugène Ionesco, directed by Anna Marboe

It's Sunday, almost noon, summer. Behringer and his friend Hans witness a strange incident: a rhinoceros has been spotted! Should something be done now? One by one, more and more rhinos appear, which turn out to be the inhabitants of the town. Afflicted by an inexplicable evil, the desire to transform themselves into these strong, aggressive and insensitive pachyderms increases as the humans transform. Some opt for this way of life because they admire their raw strength and simplicity, while others think that the animals can be humanized again once they have learned to empathize with their way of thinking. Fewer and fewer can resist the temptation to follow the same path as everyone else. At the same time, Behringer's determination to resist this exuberant mass phenomenon rises to unimagined, absurd heights.

When more and more people from his circle of acquaintances joined fascist movements at the end of the 1930s, Eugène Ionesco wrote about "what could perhaps be described as the current of public opinion, the sudden emergence of an opinion, its contagious power, which is not inferior to that of a real epidemic." He had witnessed "mental mutation" - to the point where real understanding became impossible. As a master of absurdist theater, Ionesco wrote a play of clever wordplay that broke with the dramatic conventions of his time. Anna Marboe brings the text to the stage anew and confronts the complex questions of faith in humanity, conformism and dehumanization with a great deal of humour and political urgency.

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