Rhinoceros in Love (reviewed for Rave magazine)

(view and comment on this review posted on the Rave magazine site HERE)   TUESDAY, 04 OCTOBER 2011 Rhinoceros In Love is quite possibly the best Chinese quasi-musical tragi-comedic love story featuring a rhino I have seen this year. Although the use of subtitles displayed on a narrow elevated screen sometimes made following dialogue difficult (and made the monolingual contingent of the audience resemble spectators at a vertically-oriented tennis match), this was unquestionably a captivating and idiosyncratic piece of work. The story follows a young Rhino keeper named Ma Lu who is frustrated by the restraints and compromises of conventional society and yearns for a life filled with love, passion and universal truth. The play eschews following a traditional narrative progression and instead alternates between a series of monologues, bizarre musical comedic interludes and dream-like sequences. Writer Liao Yimei has stated that the play is not intended to focus purely on story, but to act as a parable for the human spirit, the power of belief and the pursuit of dreams and ideals. Ma Lu becomes engaged in the relentless pursuit of the beautiful but infuriatingly fickle Ming Ming, who has sworn her love to another man who treats her cruelly and yet remains the unyielding focus of her romantic attention. Ma Lu, who possesses a supernaturally strong sense of smell, falls head over heels for “the girl who smells like photocopier.” While his friends try and convince him to join them in the pursuit of more easily attainable frivolous sexual conquests, Ma Lu remains resolutely focused on Ming Ming, delivering a series of poetic professions of love in the face of reason. A rhino forgets the grassland. A water bird forgets the river. A man in hell forgets heaven. A leg amputee forgets a brisk walk. To forget is what a normal person does. But I’ve decided…not to forget.  Rhinoceros alternates between these screamed supplications to the heavens and farcical comedic scenes featuring the larger cast. It is the play’s ability to successfully swing between these two disparate forms that allows Rhinoceros to escape becoming a cheap melodrama and instead present itself as an abstract examination of the human spirit in all its extremes. The hilariously entertaining ‘Love Tutorial’ scenes, where the characters learn how to express feelings through pop songs and Hollywood cliché, are performed with lively comedic panache. In an early scene, the character known as Toothbrush takes centre stage and eagerly exclaims, “Let us fly high in the skies of hygiene!” The lights of the third act open to a stage filled with water, before Ma Lu’s final monologue is delivered beneath a torrent of artificial rain, ending Rhinoceros In Love with a beautiful yet tragic final image. It a scene rendered all the more heart-wrenching by the girl in the next row who decides to snap a picture of it on her iPhone. Perhaps she should have avoided lighting up the seats around her and instead followed Ma Lu’s advice, deciding to never forget. JOSH DONELLAN