Rhino

Ground-breaking theatre returns to the Bow Arts Courtyard, exploring art and its capacity to comment on the 2017 Political Climate.

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?

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.