When speaking of his dramatic writings, Ionesco has always insisted on their obsessional nature and … before the first performance of Rhinocéros in Paris, he described as his starting-point a particularly haunting obsession, the mutation of people into dangerous monsters once they have succumbed to some new fanaticism or ideology. Had not the preceding 25 years proved that they not only looked like rhinoceroses, but had really been turned into these ferocious beasts? That was as far as Ionesco was prepared to go at that moment in explaining his play. In February 1961, in a private conversation, that is to say after he had read the various interpretations offered of his play, Ionesco said that Rhinocéros was not a play against Nazism but against any fanaticism which makes of men killer-animals, and in his personal experience this fanaticism was Nazism. Throughout the play Ionesco insists on the thickening and...