Dan Kim
Professor Zlateva
WR150 M1
March 29 2018
Berenger and Crowd Psychology
In psychology, there is a term called ‘Crowd Psychology’. Crowd psychology explains that the psychology of a crowd differs from and interacts with that of the individuals within it. In the original play Rhinoceros, Eugene Ionesco describes how people’s perception of Rhinoceros changes due to the crowd psychology in a very detailed and interesting way. When a mass of people is converted to a single way of thinking or a single action, it is not just one type of person that buys in, everybody is… but except for Berenger. In Rhinoceros, people who first turn into rhinoceros are considered to be strange. However, as time passes and more people get to turned as rhinoceros, people are swayed by crowd psychology and begin to think that people who have turned into rhinoceros are beautiful, but others are ugly. However, Berenger tries hard to stick to his convictions until the end, and that struggle makes the character unique and to be stand out. The most important factor of Berenger is emotional instability. After people around Berenger, especially Jean, starts to turn into a rhinoceroses, Berenger keeps finding alcohol, depends on it, and shakes with anxiety. In the play Rhinoceros performed by Boston University College of Fine Arts, Daniel Abbes, the actor who played Berenger, expressed the details of Berenger’s emotion very well.
In Act 1, Berenger is described as a sloppy, weak, submissive, and “marginal” character. At the start of Act 1, he is portrayed as a shabby alcoholic man in untidy attire. It is a striking comparison to Jean, a tidy friend who is dressed up with the proper outfit and even carries a spare necktie in his pocket. When the rhinoceros first appears in the city, Berenger is the only one who shows moderate reaction while Jean and all other citizens around him make a big fuss. When Jean asks Berenger’s opinion about the rhinoceros’ sudden appearance and disturbance in the middle of the town, he answers as “Well -nothing- it made a lot of dust” (Ionesco 15). It is a very opposite reaction to the way everyone is enthusiastically debating about the irrational event that they all never experienced in their lifetime. Compared to many responses, his reaction is infinitely negligent, and moreover, it seems insincere. However, from Act 2, the evolution of Berenger occurs. At the end of Act 1, Jean eventually turns into a rhinoceros. For Berenger who has always considered Jean a very logical person, Jean's change brings a great shock and horror. As time goes by, people around Berenger, such as his coworkers Botard and Dudrad, all turn into rhinoceros one by one. Some of them even choose to turn into rhinoceroses by their own will. Looking at them, Berenger is gripped by extreme fear, and the obsession with remaining human makes him drink more alcohol each day. As his mental anxiety deepens and fewer people remain as “human,” Berenger becomes a major character in the play.
Berenger then develops a romantic relationship with Daisy, his office co-worker that Berenger loves in vain. In the moment of all the people around him slowly turning into rhinoceros, lover Daisy stays with him and becomes a significant support for Berenger. Berenger suffers from severe anxiety disorder, but his love affair with Daisy instantly changes him to a lively and strong-willed human being. When Daisy says that there is a much larger number of rhinoceroses outside the window in Act 3, Berenger says: “We’re still in the majority. We must take advantage of that. We must do something before we’re inundated” (Ionesco 110). Berenger and Daisy become lovers too rapidly, and Berenger's state of mind drastically changes in response. When I watched a play held at BU’s CFA, I was quite confused by the rapidly changing attitude of Berenger. It felt like his psychological change skips the stage of exposition and rising action. For the actor, it must have been challenging to portray the emotions of the dramatic psychological changes. However, Abbes expressed his feelings in details, such as facial expressions, a shift from an anxious look to hopeful look, and a change of tone, so that the audience could convey the characters’ state of mind well. He continued to act without focus and with a straight face during Act 2, but after Berenger starts dating Daisy, Abbes turned into a face with a bright look and a smile. Abbes gave top credit to save the rapid development of the story, which could cause serious disruption to the audience.
His change is not over here. As the story draws to the end, even Daisy goes out and joins a large group of rhinoceros. Berenger, who considers Daisy as a last and only hope, is shocked. Daisy's transformation changes Berenger’s standard of beauty and ugliness. Before Daisy leaves him, Berenger has a firm backbone that humans are beautiful and rhinoceros are ugly. When his best friend Jean, all of his other office employees, and most other people around the world are turning into rhinoceros, Berenger fears about him transforming into “ugly” rhinoceros. That is why Berenger suffers from severe anxiety disorder and alcoholism to soothe his anxiety. Until he falls in love with Daisy, he always wears a bandage around his forehead and is concerned if his nose or forehead will develop horns, or if his white skin will turn disgusting green-grey. However, Berenger loses his faith in humanity and finds rhinoceroses beautiful after Daisy’s “rhinoceritis” occurs. He no longer considers human as beautiful things and rhinoceros as ugly creatures. In the last scene of Act 3, Berenger stands in front of the mirror, picking every single part of his outer parts, and wails about his ugly self as: “I haven’t got any horns, more’s the pity. A smooth brow looks so ugly. I need one or two horns to give my sagging face a lift. Perhaps one will grow and I needn’t be ashamed any more… my skin is so slack. I can’t stand this white, hairy body” (Ionesco 130). After all, Berenger is also dominated by crowd psychology.
Later, however, Berenger's last line gives another big twist. When he becomes the last person left as a human, and experiences great confusion about his identity, most audiences would think Berenger will turn into a rhinoceros just like others did and joins the majority. Berenger is swayed, but he is not beguiled. As “Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats Rhinoceritis” explains, “left alone as the last human but nonetheless resolute, Berenger concludes that he will not capitulate but will instead fight, from that moment on, against all the rhinoceros and the phenomenon of "rhinoceritis" in the world” (Quinney 37). He is once shaken, but after he regains his composure, Berenger says “oh, well, too bad. I’ll take on all of them. I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them. I’m the last man left, and I am staying that way until the end. I am not capitulating” (Ionesco 131).
Besides the fact that Berenger is the last character who keeps humanity and remains as a human, reason that makes Berenger outstanding among other characters is that there is a definite contrast with others, especially Dudard. Dudard is an elite graduate of a prestigious university, who is very intellectual. He is even recognized as a talented employee in the office who will be promoted rapidly. However, compared to Dudard, Berenger is a very emotional and sloppy character. He is frequently late for work, always dresses improperly, and loves drinking too much. Those contrasting factors of two characters emphasize how different and unique Berenger is. The most essential characteristic of Dudard is that he loves rational things and facts, which is very opposite to Berenger’s characteristic. Dudard was initially been open to both sides of keep being as a human and turn into a rhinoceros. He eventually “chooses” to be a rhinoceros but after the intellectual throughout. He only makes a rational decision with composure. There is no humanity, no animal instinct, and no religious reason. Unlike Jean, Dudard does not have a process of turning into a rhinoceros with a nervous wreck. Dudard just leaves Berenger’s house saying “I shall keep my mind clear. [He starts to move around the stage in circles]. As clear as it ever was. But if you’re going to criticize, it’s better to do so from the inside. I’m not going to abandon them. I won’t abandon them” (Ionesco 114).
And in the play, two actors, Daniel Abbes and Ben Murphy, play off each other very well. When Dudard visits the sick Berenger's house, they have a little argument about people turning into rhinoceros. If you take a good look at the conversation they share, you will see that each line convey each characters’ personality. Dudard consistently keeps calm attitude from beginning to end and presents the rationale and reasoning every time. Berenger, on the other hand, finds himself at a loss for the reason, suffers emotional turbulence at every word Dudard makes, loses his temper, and rambles. When Berenger tries to persuade Dudard, all he says is that “well, just like that. I feel it, just like that” (Ionesco 104). For Dudard, who even mentions Galileo Galilei while talking about people turning into rhinoceros and requires reason and logic in everything, Berenger’s slapdash way of persuading cannot work. When playing their argument scenes, Abbes and Murphy act well at tone and appearance in accordance with their roles. Abbes runs around the stage like a madman. He changes his tone of voice or facial expression as Berenger’s emotion changes back and forth. His acting adds immersion to the play. Murphy, on the other hand, makes much fewer moves than Abbes and uses voluble but quiet tone. The lines of the two characters are still very contrasting, but the actors' performances emphasize the contrast.
Honestly, at first, I did not expect much for a play performed by college students, who are not the professional actors who made their debut. However, most of the actors performed better than I expected. In particular, I was astonished to the actor who played Berenger. Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros is a three-act play, which is not that long. But in it, Berenger goes through many emotional changes. Some emotional changes even come very abruptly, skipping the development of content that allows actors to draw empathy to their characters. But Berenger's emotional instability in the play is such a big part of the play that if the actor fails to express it well, the whole play can be a mess. As it is a major role, the burden is also substantial. That is why Berenger is such a tricky role to play. I was surprised when I read the interview with Daniel Abbes in BU Today article that advertises the play. He is fully aware of how Berenger plays an essential and huge role in this play, what the character Berenger means for Ionesco, and how Berenger faces the “rhinoceritis.” In the interview, he explains Berenger as this:
[Berenger]’s based on Ionesco himself, when he was in France watching his friends, his peers, his colleagues slowly pick up this language of fascism that led to the rise of the Third Reich and the Nazis.” The rhinoceros symbolizes a group mentality, a mob mentality, more than any particular ideology, he says.
“What keeps him from falling into this mob and turning into a rhinoceros is this steadfast refusal, this rejection of something he knows is fundamentally bad,” Abbes says. “He can’t win that way. But the fact that he does not give in is a testament, it’s a statement that’s much bigger than him” (“A Galloping Rhinoceros”).
I guess it would be even harder for an amateur college sophomore who is still learning. I want to give lavish praise on all the actors and actresses for their hard work.
Works Cited
Brown, Joel. “A Galloping Rhinoceros Opens Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre.” BU Today, 21 Feb. 2018,
www.bu.edu/today/2018/a-galloping-rhinoceros-opens-joan-edgar-booth-theatre/.
Ionesco, Eugène. Rhinoceros: a Play in Three Acts. Samuel French, 1960.
Quinney, Anne Holloway. “Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats
Rhinoceritis.” South Central Review, vol. 24, no. 3, 2007, pp. 36–52.,
doi:10.1353/scr.2007.0044.
Rhinoceros. By Eugène Ionesco, directed by Clay Hopper, 24 Feb. 2018, Joan & Edgar Booth
Theatre, Boston, MA. Performance.