Ionesco startles audiences with a world that erupts in explosive laughter and nightmarish anxiety. A rhinoceros inexplicably appears in a small French town, tramping through its streets, alarming its confused residents. Soon there are two, then three, until the rhinoceros "movement" invades the life of ordinary citizens and becomes universal as they transform into beasts and learn to "move with the times."

Rhinocéros is a commentary on the seduction of mass-movements. When everyone else around us insists that something is so, how can we disagree, even if it is in direct contradiction to the facts?