When we meet Berenger, first scene of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, there’s very little to admire about him. He’s likable enough, compared with the anal-retentive Jean, but he is at best an amiable drunk (the American film version cast Gene Wilder as Berenger opposite Zero Mostel’s Jean, hoping to recreate the chemistry of The Producers). At any rate, Berenger is a lazy, slovenly, uninspired drunkard who shows up to lunch late, hungover and generally disheveled.

By the end of the play, he is the last human being on Earth. It is an unlikely and largely unexplained metamorphosis.

It makes sense only when you stop thinking in terms of heroes and villains and remember that Berenger is the point-of-view character — a strange notion in theatre, but particularly true here: by the conclusion, he is the only character capable of maintaining his own point of view, unlike the “rhinoceroses,” Ionesco’s friends and associates who, one after the other, all fell prey to the unthinking, group-oriented, animalistic appeal of fascism.

We all have doubts, like Berenger: who am I alone to say this is wrong? My friends are better than me in every respect: better at their jobs, more respectable in their social lives, more intelligent, better at attracting the opposite sex. If I say “I will not do this; this is wrong” who am I to get on my high horse and pass judgment over these people?

And yet that is what must be done.

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