One rhinoceros appears in a small French town, thundering down the main street and overturning a grocer's display, and the townspeople debate whether it had one horn or two. Then another appears. Then more. Soon the citizens themselves are transforming, their skin thickening, their foreheads sprouting horns, and they are glad of it. Eugène Ionesco premiered this play in 1959, drawing on memories of watching friends in 1930s Romania embrace fascism with a fervour that resembled ecstasy. Bérenger, the shabby protagonist, resists not from heroism but from a stubborn inability to join the herd. The absurdist comedy darkens into horror as conformity becomes biological, a vivid parable about the seductive ease of surrendering one's own mind.