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 ...