Rhino

About

Performance Details: 7pm, Friday 7 April, Saturday 8 April, then Thursday 27 and Friday 28 April 2017

Rhino is a conversation with Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros. Award-winning company LUXE will present Ionesco’s classic Theatre of the Absurd text, reimagined into the political climate of 2017 as a series of live performances, videos, film and debates – directed by LUXE Founder and Artistic Director Cradeaux Alexander.

The play will be staged in Bow Arts Courtyard, surrounded by their Victorian warehouse studios, following LUXE’s celebrated production of Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail in the summer, as featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and the Evening Standard’s Going Out.

Set around a sound stage, Rhino explores the aesthetics of televised political debate and behind-the-scenes intimacies. Its characters confront the impossible: is the whole word turning into a rhino?

Rhino expands the definition of a ‘play’. Its locus privileges the real-time-space of performers within the immediate circumstances of their audience (we like to see and hear the audience breathe and whisper while we perform),  while the play itself moves in and out of time and traditional narrative drama through mediated televisual spaces. Rhino will ultimately be accessible across the globe through online videos, documentation and film – with teasers released online in the weeks running up to the show.

Ionescos’ original text is a hallmark of the Theatre of the Absurd; equal parts drama, romance, and a warning of the power and allure of Fascism.  When your friends, lovers and colleagues switch sides and turn into rhinos, what can you do? In 2017, when your friends, lovers and colleagues get swept up in populist movements reminiscent of the 1930s, the situation remains equally as absurd.

In the event of wet weather, the courtyard will be covered so the show will go on!

Tickets available here