These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. The Chairs depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life to the rest of humanity, while The Lesson is a chilling, but anarchically funny drama of verbal domination. In these three 'antiplays' dream, nonsense and fantasy combine to create an unsettling, bizarre view of society.
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First Sentence
The scene is a square in a small provincial town. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
The scene is a square in a small provincial town. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Demosthenes
Format:Paperback
First the communists turned into rhinos, but I was not a communist
Then the socialists turned into rhinos, but I was not a socialist
Then the trade unionists turned into rhinos, but I was not a trade unionist
Then the Jews turned into rhinos, but I was not a Jew
Then the Catholics turned into rhinos, but I was not a catholic
Then I realised that everyone had turned into rhinos and everything was just getting far to allegorical for me to feel fully comfortable.
Then the socialists turned into rhinos, but I was not a socialist
Then the trade unionists turned into rhinos, but I was not a trade unionist
Then the Jews turned into rhinos, but I was not a Jew
Then the Catholics turned into rhinos, but I was not a catholic
Then I realised that everyone had turned into rhinos and everything was just getting far to allegorical for me to feel fully comfortable.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Excellent sense of humor, short and easy to read. Very good example of the funny side of the theater of the absurd.
Format:Paperback
Ionesco here presents three plays the first of which sees a rhinoceros enter into an everyday street scene, the second of which itself is a setting of a play with largely non-existent actors and a load of chairs and the third which features a bizarre exchange between a professor and his young female student. The absurdity of the plays makes not just for great humour, but meaning also. To my mind I preferred the second two plays The Chairs, and The Lesson which I thought were more effective and were more enjoyable than Rhinoceros although this too was often blisteringly funny.
By Elen
Format:Paperback
The item was brand new, quickly delivered in excellent condition. If you are happy with the content you are going for, the product is decent and does the job. I am not perfectly happy because I am not keen on the paperback (it even gets damp in the cold days) but I was not promised something else. So you get what you see and good value for money(the particular is not easy to find in bookstores). I also recommend it for the content!
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
These plays are all three excellent works of absurd theatre. In Rhinoceros people keep changing to, you guessed it, rhino's, in The Chairs, you have chairs instead of actors on the stage and in The Lesson there is a problem with language and a quiet special teacher. It is hard to review these wonderful plays in such a short space. Ionesco loves to play with the language and its shortcomings. The absurd is there to make a point. It makes you see the obvious in a new light. Even 50 years later they feel more modern than what is written today. I recommend these plays to anyone that want to think, laugh and get bewildered. They will make you reconsider what you thought was the borders of theatre.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This book is extremely useful for A-Level students studying French because it goes hand-in-hand with the copy in French. As a book on it's own, it is extremely entertaining, witty in places and has several imaginative touches. Rhinoceros is the longest of the three, the other two being slightly shorter, with all three being very different in context but fantastically similar in style. I would sincerely recommend this as it is a good read and available at a superb price!
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