Rhinoceros

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork Feb 20-25 8pm €15-€25 021-4501673 everyman palace.com; Town Hall Theatre, Galway Feb 27-29 8pm 091-569777 tht.ie; Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, Co Kerry Mar 2 8pm 066-7123055

For more than 20 years, Blue Raincoat has been a modest company with a tendency to think big. A full-time ensemble based in Sligo, it has eked out a unique position in Ireland by grafting European physical performance onto the landscape of Irish literary theatre. In recent years its ambitions have grown bigger and more precise.

Last year, Jocelyn Clarke's The Poor Mouth, an adaptation of An Beal Bocht, marked the company's third installment of a Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen trilogy. Now director Niall Henry does the same with Eugène Ionesco, following The Bald Sopranoand The Chairswith this 1959 absurdist classic about the pressure of conformity and the anxiety of remaining an individual.

It seems like a natural pairing between material and company: Bérenger (the naive, imaginative everyman and mercurial reprobate in a number of Ionesco plays) discovers his fellow citizens turning into rhinos. For “rhinoceros” you can read everything from Communism to consumerism, but the metaphor seems especially well chosen for a physical theatre company: the collective noun for rhinos, after all, is a “crash”.

With their national tour now charging to Cork, Galway and Kerry, the inimitable Blue Raincoat also know the value of doing their own thing.

Can't see that? Catch this:Purple Project Arts Centre, Dublin