Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco

Town square

Town square. Typical small French town, perhaps close to Paris, in which the play opens shortly before noon on a sunny summer Sunday. The grocer’s is open, as is the café-bar with chairs and tables outside. Although the time period is not made clear, it is probably a couple of decades earlier than the time of writing.

Office

Office. Place where Berenger works, in which the play’s second act opens. It may or may not be a government office; it has an old-fashioned air, with pens and an inkwell mentioned, as well as typewriters, chairs, tables, and desks, and an inner office for its chief. The main office is reached by climbing up a set of wooden stairs and is thus beyond the reach of a charging rhinoceros.

Jean’s home

Jean’s home. Two rooms of an apartment house in which Berenger’s friend Jean lives and in which the second scene of act 2 is set. Jean is in bed in his bed-sitting room when Berenger calls; the other room is his offstage bathroom. The apartment’s furnishings are simple and sparse. It is still Monday morning, because Berenger has been forced out of his office by the rhinoceros attack. Jean’s metamorphosis to rhinoceros occurs during the second scene of act 2.

Berenger’s room

Berenger’s room. This is as simple as Jean’s with a bed and a chair, but it also contains a telephone and a radio. The day is unspecified but is probably Tuesday. Outside the building, many of the townsfolk are now rhinoceroses, charging up and down the street in large herds, which grow larger as Berenger is visited by his colleagues, first Dudard and then Daisy the typist, to whom he desperately declares his love. The telephone rings, but only rhinoceroses are on the line. They turn on the radio but it broadcasts only the musical trumpetings of rhinoceroses. There is no hope.