The Ginger Mumbly

I was disappointed by  Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros at Jackson's Lane on Saturday evening.   Here is what I think:

• Accents, American and French! A disastrous "rookie error" which screams "am dram" and robbed these kids of their natural power of speech.  One of the central characters was almost inaudible throughout, and I was in the second row.
• Allowing the kids to corpse and wink and giggle at the audience, popped the suspension of disbelief.
• The central scene in the whole play was done in the dark.  Massively reducing its absurdist - and therefore its dramatic effect.
• Not only did we not see the rhinoceros, we didn't even hear it.  Would it perhaps not have been better to allow the whole cast to yell as shriek to produce the sound of stampeding rhinoceroses? And perhaps warm them up vocally so they could be heard through the rest of the performance?

The result was a denatured play, robbed of its genuine terror and therefore its point, and of course, a lot of the fun and benefit to the kids who were performing in it.  

This might have been an accident, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just safer for the director to distance and defuse the play by letting these kids mumble through these lines with cod 'allo 'allo accents, as if they were doing the whole thing with their fingers crossed behind their backs. Maybe in front of an audience of middle class, professional parents, it was just more comfortable to pretend that we are completely in the dark about the process by which people do turn into Rhinoceroses.  Are we really?  Have we not seen it happen recently to several politicians right before our eyes? Has it never happened to any of your friends, your family? Sure the point of the play is that the transformation into Rhinoceroses is not so mysterious and happens all the time. Not in France, not in America, but here in England, even in Highgate.