He knew that the human race in general is illogical, often lacking sophistication, mostly badly educated, filled with bluster, loquaciousness and incapable of cogent analysis - increasingly we are inured to it. Perhaps he chose not to single out the French response to the Nazis. Perhaps Ionesco deliberately eschewed Camus' specificity and embraced generality in the hope that for all its antic lack of sophistication, bluster, bustle and loquaciousness, Rhinoceros would remain contemporary and universal. And I could just as easily write off Ionesco's questioning of 'normal' behaviour as a precursor to RD Laingian hippy psycho-babble - but that would be wilfully reductive. You could say Albert Camus does it better - colder, smarter, steelier.

The hero, Berenger, is alternately frightened, defiant, desperate, frustrated, impotent, self-loathing, envious and ultimately completely unhinged by the 'epidemic' in a way that is immediately recognisable to us. Most children know that the smart thing is to side with the biggest, baddest bully in the playground. By not singling out the French, he heretically suggested that most people try to get along with the boot boys as a matter of Darwinist expedience, however stupid it may be, and then, weirdly, it becomes a passion. Presumably the first Royal Court production was radical in its time because, in a postwar climate of jingoism and defiance, Ionesco understood that brute force has a way of making some of us side with the bullies - even growing to defend them. Rhinoceros is filled with animal grunts and snorts and panicky human frailty, showing us how it feels to have one's identity subsumed and traduced. Both seem rooted in an existentialist tradition, which is as much about the futility and absurdity of the human condition as it is about our historical capacity for cruelty.

Both The Plague and Rhinoceros evoke the French response to the Nazis, but more interestingly today, they describe a human response to creeping transmogrification. A comparison to Albert Camus' The Plague is perhaps more appropriate. Rhinoceros is allegedly a parable about French collaboration with the Nazis. It has been compared to George Orwell's Animal Farm, but Animal Farm is about power corrupting Russian communists.

Eugene rhinoceros