According to one member of the cast, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is ‘a satire on how useless the intellectuals in France were in pointing out the stupidity of fascism and communism in the 1940s’. On this count, the play deserves 10 out of 10. Set in a French provincial town, we watch the protagonists’ varying responses as their fellow inhabitants transform into (beautifully, sinisterly masked) rhinoceroses.

Jake Alden-Falconer’s pompous Marxist gent Mr Botard convinces and delights the audience as he fulminates against what he deems a capitalist ‘hoax’ and ‘shameful machination’. He refuses to accept the reality; when he later transforms, Ionesco’s low estimation of the fickle and impressionable intelligentsia shines through brilliantly. Tolerant liberals take a good kicking too for their inadequate responses, with Fred Maynard putting in an exceptional performance as the moral relativist lawyer, Dudard.  We are taken aback by his carefree acceptance of, and even mirth at, the ‘rhinoceritis’ that has overcome his boss and his scorn for the moral indignation and fears of his friend, Berenger.

Laura Profumo’s simpleminded beauty Daisy, more concerned with the dust entering through the window than the rhinos stomping around outside it, also impresses in her conveyance of the average citizen’s curious propensity for ploughing on with the banalities of day-to-day life as the world is upheaved around them.

In other ways, however, the play rather disappoints. It is as though several of the actors have learnt their lines at the last minute, and have put on their characters’ socks but still not thrown themselves fully into their shoes. Instead there are too many obvious stereotypes – the exasperated boss, the suave and strait-laced snob, the doddering old man. The background musicians, for all the pleasant gypsy folk tunes emanating from their accordions and trumpets, look rather ill at ease, solemn and as though they too had only just got to grips with their music.

The wonderful Jennie King broke the trend, however, injecting a riveting vivacity into her archetypal melodramatic French lady, Madame Boeuf. The audience dissolved into laughter repeatedly as she sashayed along, shrieking, weeping, flirting and fainting her way across the stage with admirable gusto.

James Morris plays the lead as tormented last-surviving human Berenger, and though clearly a talented actor, he largely fails to evoke our sympathy. The harrowing intensity of his monologue of inner torment, hair-clutching and psychotic eyes that filled the last scene would have been outstanding had similar wretchedness not filled most of the previous scenes.

Part of the problem was the repetitiveness of the script in this two-and-a-quarter hour performance. A Guardian critic said of another performance that the last scene had him ‘wrenching [his] head from side to side with the tension’, but for the girl sat next to me, it looked more like boredom. With an unflinching pruning of the script by the director’s razor and a little more character development in rehearsals, it could have been an excellent show.