Theatre As a Smiling Clown in a Knock-Em-Down Gallery

A reflection on Eugene Ionesco's play RHINOCEROS

The lemming smile of the porcelain clown can't help but haunt the savage moment of one's demise; the demise of the artist and the observer of human kind as it descends into the banal oblivion of cultural goo ...

The idiot smile of certainty

planted on the faces

of once seemingly intelligent creatures

as mouths scream and chant the slogans

of the platitudinous gods ...

that smile of the revolutionary hero

about to die ...

like a Nikolai Bukharin of 2026

Is certainty a given?

Eugene Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros" is perhaps more relevant today as the cultural elites and controllers of cultural thought and newspeak have forgotten the original context of the rampaging thought-made-flesh that was the original context of Ionesco's work!

The play is very unkind to that wonderful animal that is the rhinoceros; comparing it as a monstrosity that is modern thought processes was extremely unkind ... yet it was a sort of means to focus the homeless mind on to some context that could illustrate the absurdity of mass psychosis and identity.

Absurdity in theatre didn't begin with plays

Absurdity begins with acceptance of the fragility and weakness of our ability to process the world around us. Culture would gladly, under certain circumstances, gladly accept the dead pig's head on a stick as a representation of god or devil if given the right circumstances. The absurdist playwright simply magnifies this constancy in a way that is distanced and comical. Neurosis and enabling go hand in hand with an insane society as once truths become lies and lies become truths in the post modern nightmare of privileged societies too weak to even begin to decipher the insane paradigms of its imprisonment. Identification becomes leading concept in all of ones reality. So if someone identifies as a cat, then kitty litter trays would need to be placed in the rest rooms ... and this is happening! Post Modern suck from the likes of Foucault permeate all our realities. So where are the see-ers? The artists and playwrights?

Ionesco and the absurdists didn't invent these mocking scenarios so evident in their plays. Rather the plays are conduits of intellectual viruses that penetrate the steely armour of academia and social control. Arthur Miller was wrong to castigate the absurdist for being some kind of fence sitting deviate who celebrates the meaninglessness of life. What Arthur Miller didn't realise is that he was the ultimate absurdist married to an icon and proclaiming that his plays would have any impact on society ... yeah: entertaining but with no ultimate lasting impact. How absurd is that? To be sucked in by one's own sense of importance! Schools, even the most conservative, present his Crucible every year. Absurd?

Theatre, the ultimate fool or ultimate clown?

Theatre stands with the fool on the hill trying to bat off the castigating rats that are thrown at it. It contemplates its sense of unassailing sanctimonious righteousness. It KNOWS it knows the truths about everything and so Theatre is confident in it's inescapable truth of its existence. It is confident that unwashed sacrificial plebs and yobbos and that underclass of far right rednecks cannot touch or breach the outer-walls of its established hegemony over nothing! Theatre is proud. Its practiced smile is that of the percaline clown at the side show. The smiling maggots that creep over its facsimile add to the esteemed culture that its homeless mind embraces. For it is a nothing! An over-bloated carcass of one's own past that self realises its ridiculous existence on the hill overlooking the village of idiots. It invites its own implosion with its self-conscious intimacy and its trigger of warnings that threaten to blast it into the fiction of 1984.

So the crowd sways and chants its everlasting chant of approval as Theatre is so slowly, ever so slowly, deconstructed and dismembered from its ivory tower on the hill. The fool is lost and disorientated. The Clown simply cries and laughs uncontrollably. The fabricated theatre that exists in the side-show is slowly being knocked down in the gallery of clowns. The adherents are being taken out and shot.

But it was never necessary to shoot anyone as the implosion did all the dirty work. Theatre stopped being part of the relevant few when it failed to see the elephant in the room: or should we say the rhinoceros rampaging all about us. The transfiguration of mind into semantic dissonance; the inability to differentiate the semantic construction with any sense of actuality! The Foucault infection so invisible and yet so deadly ... Shakespeare's hovel falling into a sink-hole where Harry Potter disappeared into a mesh of his own making! This is where the all-licenced fool is buried.

The clown struggles to sit on a chair. It is a clown after-all. The fool cries uncontrollably in the foyer of some distant destroyed edifice of a once thriving venue. The nearby schools that once taught Drama and presented theatre, no matter how naïve, have closed the doors while no longer allowing their young participants to achieve eye contact lest that be a form of abuse. They no longer allow students any form of body contact as that would be a contemporary sin ... an attack on safety and any degree of human response to each other or the universe ...

And so the ruins become the setting for a new generation of daleks ... The clowns exterminated; the smiles reimaged ... the dead Narcissus replaces the homeless mind of fictional theatre ...

Have a listen to Fecal Rain; Faecal Reign

Fecal Rain Faecal Reign is now available for listening in full

For years I have struggled against the depressing feeling that Erich Fromm's "The Sane Society" was a blueprint for analysing and accepting our current world ... and now?

But it is.

My Fecal Rain is not meant to be an uplifting saga to reassure our generations that all will be right ... nor is it a nihilist suggestion that nothing matters anyway ... Fecal Rain Faecal Reign suggests a world where ants and maggots evolve to rule and the sane play along ... their neurosis hidden by the fear of exposure to the fluff of beating drums of the agendas ...

You can now listen to Fecal Rain Faecal Reign here:

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/artsoundtheatre/episodes/2025-06-11T04_12_11-07_00

However please ensure no children are listening to this work.

You might be interested in also reading the following essays that give some suggestion of context to my play. These include:

Oikophobia Theatre Needing to Demise

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/oikophobia-theatre-needing-to-demise

Art, Theatre and the Homeless Culture

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/art-theatre-and-the-homeless-culture

Happy Listening and reading

Joe Woodward

Oikophobia Theatre Needing to Demise

Worthless and scared friends who promote death over life in theatre ... thoughtless arrogance and nothingness

You might have friends who are opposed to everything you know and yet you stand by them and all that your friends champion!

Now in the UK, Europe and Australia, there are ideas, ideologies and impulses being integrated into cultural platforms and legal entities while being diametrically opposed to all that has been gained in the west over centuries; much of which was the result of blood shedding and torture inflicted on the proponents of change. There are arts activists and creators who ignore and otherwise champion the dictates of misogynist advocates, culturally smug problemists and outright activists of absurd belief systems now being seriously considered within Australian society ... But what is more concerning is the evident oikophobia so obvious in art, education and elitist areas of Australian society!

This fear of who and what we are, or what we have been assumed into, is crippling conceptual development and artistic insight. The distractions of placebo ideologies and the assuage of comforting cultural straitjackets seemingly to protect individual psyches from the distress of seeing and of feeling the dangerous and threatening realities around them kills the very possibility of artistic creation. In theatre, its most obvious manifestation is the mandatory "Trigger Warning". The trigger warning before any attempt to engage with the world and its deceptions applies to both audiences and particularly to the would-be artist and student of art. The "Trigger Warning" is the weapon of the dictator. The "Trigger Warning" is the barrier to seeing through the charlatan constructions of reality and the cultural dogmas that contain and constrain free thought and the art of perception. And all done to somehow protect the individual from some imagined and / or real anxiety! The "Trigger Warning" is the shield to affirm particular ways of seeing and experiencing. It is a weapon of propaganda to nullify opposition to particular world-views and agendas; all in the name of protecting sensibilities and personal mental health.

Oikophobia and Theatre Creation

While theatre has always had strains of oppositional threads to dominant cultural values in the West since at least the mid nineteenth century, today it needs to factor in the tendency of significant elements in society that express an oikophobia on a social and cultural scale not seen in previous generations. This recognition was the starting point for my play "And Beyond the Violence" that had its genesis ten years ago and followed up with a number of rewrites and trial readings since. And it is still in development!

A romantic view of culture seems to hold that culture, in and of itself, has divine qualities; god-given qualities that can only be questioned by those from within such cultures. We see this expressed in cultural creations in art and society. A Modernist view tended to suggest that when all cultures submitted to the Western traditions, ie. women's rights, free speech, dialectical responses in rational discourse that the world would become more rational and civilised. Two world wars put an end to such belief ... The fact that the west rejected its own calling created its own crisis ...

Post Modernism then took an opposite view: all cultures are primarily equal, at least in intent; though with Western cultures having to acknowledge their basic inferiority to all others. Accidents of technological advancement have placed Western Cultures in an advantaged position over others; or so it seems! However, each culture has its own logic and value with each having aspects that another culture cannot possibly understand. So logically, no one from one culture can critically analyse another ... with one caveat: cultures assumed to have been consumed or dominated by a colonial culture may in fact criticise and openingly attack such a dominant culture; UNLESS SUCH CULTURES EMINATED FROM THE OTTOMAN COLONIAL EMPIRE, an Islamic colonial empire that stretched from Europe through Asia for nearly 600 years!

But this is a tangent. Theatre has largely expressed a critical eye over much of our cultural experience. And rightly so! It has almost always taken the position of the oppressed against the oppressor. I'm trying to think of examples where this was not the case. I stand to be corrected on this point! However, in relation to theatrical and performance models from traditional and totalitarian societies we see a contrast to affirmations of the cultural identity and dominance by the ruling elites. Theatre like the licensed fool of Medieval times is the legitimate voice of caution and dissent in the face of the establishment and aristocracy! It is the escape valve for ruling classes needing to be off-the-hook for their travesties! It is also the voice for the hidden and silenced outcasts from society!

But in 2025, the ruling elite is changed. Social media and academic decay into semantic games of pseudo-logic has hit a Babylonian height of extreme extrapolation from reality into fantasy backed by seemingly logical research! The ideological instructs the semantic: so everything from Magna Carta to the present is unknown territory for modern playwrights, artists and dramaturgs ...

And who has ever heard of these seminal moments ..???

Theatre practitioners need to stand above the petty and the seemingly clear ... Oikophobic artistry is fine when one has little benchmark for comparison. Yet there is so much within the parameters of our cultural parameters that is crying out for our scalpel. Think about it! Yes, we need to do it! But what other cultural arts groups spend so much energy and critical analysis on critiquing their own cultures? Oikophobia tends to be an element of Australian cultural proliferation ... and to much extent, highly praise-worthy! But is it hate THE word or should it be love ...

Have a listen to FECAL RAIN FAECAL REIGN:

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/artsoundtheatre/episodes/2025-06-11T04_12_11-07_00

Cheers

Joe Woodward