(seen at the afternoon performance on 26th April 2025)
This performance started on a special note when Narrator Paul Hunter began asking the audience to copy his arm movements. Someone in the front row alerted him to two sight impaired people sitting there. Hunter instantly went into "audio description" mode, ensuring nobody was left out.
A unique variation proved thematic for the entire piece. Ionesco apparently helped create “theatre of the absurd.” Along with Beckett and Genet (according to Google), he defined it.
On this evidence, the monkey feels he is far more interesting than either of the other two as well.
Far less ponderous than “Waiting for Godot,” Omar Elerian’s adaptation of a tale about Rhinoceroses appearing at random in the street before townsfolk begin turning into rhinos themselves and start making prank phone calls, is mostly amusing and engaging, with a logic all its own.
Being a Wembley Stadium football day, the monkey had to pass, on its way to the theatre, pubs full of football supporters heading for the game. Frankly, it proved there is nothing at all really absurd about the idea of people turning into animals.
Still, Ionesco is more creative and philosophical, as well as far less aggressive. A non-stop examination of ideas. No right answers, just thinking about people, places and examining it all from every single possible direction.
If it has four legs, it is a dog. Therefore, my cat is a dog. If there are more or fewer than four legs, is it still? An early posed question in the play, amusing as much as confusing.
The first half is like that. The second is more practical as the transitions begin, and increase exponentially. To find half one’s office colleagues have changed proves rightly disconcerting for those who remain - and they act accordingly.
Performances are fine. Sophie Steer probably really does have a watermelon for a pet, and wrings the most out of us over its demise.
John Biddle’s logician is a compelling spouter of concepts and useful Dudard. Anoushka Lucas scores as a confused secretary, Hayley Carmichaels work is as big and compellingly crazy as her hair, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù is rightly offended by reviews of his sartorial choices.
Elerian rarely lets the pace drop, and Ana Ines Jabares-Pita provides on-stage activities for many cast members to keep them going, plus fun hidey-holes throughout her white board set.
If it doesn’t quite sharpen to a precision cutting edge of anarchy, tempered by white-hot laughter, perhaps it isn’t meant to (though it may have benefitted – even if it isn’t the intention).
Never dull, more than seldom illuminating, surprisingly entertaining. Two ideas proving a point, as the work itself has it. An unexpectedly large thundering afternoon of a production.
3 stars.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner. Used by kind permission of the Almeida Theatre.