“The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eye—all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills—like a God.”

-from Peter Shaffer’s Equus

The first play that made me aware of the power of the stage was Peter Shaffer’s Equus. I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old when my father gave me his copy to read and I couldn’t put it down. The experience was intoxicating. I could see it happen in front of me, that boxing ring-like stage, those benches on the platforms in the darkened space, a light in the middle falling on Alan as he caressed Nugget, his favorite horse. The image would stay with me forever even though I was only reading it, not seeing it performed. Looking back; it was impossible for me not to fall in love with this play. As a teenager, I was already into anything that was violent and strange, and the story of a teenage boy who blinds six horses clearly fell into that category.

Yet today, I may understand much better my attraction towards the violent and the strange, an attraction which wasn’t as individually personal as I thought. I’m Maltese, born and raised on the Maltese islands in the Mediterranean, and if there is one thing that the Maltese islands excel at, it is pious religiosity. Malta is a Roman Catholic island, so Catholicism was an intrinsic part of my upbringing. This means that violent images were instilled within me from birth. The crucified Christ, with thorns in his head, blood falling all over his face, an emaciated, contorted body stretched on wood with nails driven through his hands and feet and a gaping wound to his side, was an image that pressed itself upon my mind wherever I went. Whether at school, or in church, or at catechism, or home, there was always one version or another of the crucified Christ to be seen, and as a young boy I remember always being fascinated by this image. For most people that was a mundane religious symbol, for me it was a depiction of violence, with all of the religiosity included. 

Here was a young man, Alan, that not only had a sensitivity for the divine but was able to envisage and live out his own private religion. Alan created his own rituals, found his own place and purpose amongst gods that he alone recognized and worshipped.”

It took me until my mid-teens to start weaning myself off of institutionalized religion. Up until, say, thirteen I used to take it very seriously; I prayed regularly as a child and knew my Bible stories very well. I had a strict Catholic education, having been sent to Catholic schools both for my primary years and my secondary years. In the secondary years though, I was lucky enough to have gone to a Jesuit school, which gave me the opportunity to receive a more intellectually stimulating religious education, albeit still highly conservative. So, the concept of religion as a way of life—as a path for behaving and thinking that engages even your most private and passionate ambitions—was already instilled in me before I read Equus, which made reading the play an even deeper experience.

Here was a young man, Alan, that not only had a sensitivity for the divine but was able to envisage and live out his own private religion. Alan created his own rituals, found his own place and purpose amongst gods that he alone recognized and worshipped. I was enthralled. And then there was the other aspect of the play, Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist. Again, psychiatry, psychology and anything that had to do with the study of the mind, especially perverse minds, was already on my radar. Psychological horror and detective stories were amongst my favorite genres and, a few years later, I would even pursue my first degree in psychology and anthropology. But here, I encountered a different kind of therapist. This was a doctor that was questioning his practice. This wasn’t the confident I-have-an-explanation-for-everything doctor I was used to seeing in movies. Here was a man who was questioning the very purpose of his method. His job was to bring these wayward young people to a functional normality, but what were they losing because of that? What precious, special rituals and visions was he excising from their beautifully individuated minds to make them fit in our everyday mundane existence? The boy worshipped Equus, the horse god, whilst Martin Dysart practiced his rituals at the altar of Normality, the god of the mundane. I think it was my engagement with this play that made me question strongly for the first time what we mean by normality and its oppressive persistence on our reality.

To this day, I continue to be amazed, or disappointed, at how the concept of “normal” still has so much hold on people’s behaviors and understanding of life. It has always seemed to me that any pressure to conform, to act in the ways approved by the many, is by far one of the worst forms of oppression we have to endure. Yet so many would argue that this is only “normal” or, to give it an even thicker shade of “truth,” only “natural.” (But isn’t the “natural” only the “normal” after we’ve erased its starting point from our collective memories?) Here we’re encountering the first dangerous trait of the normal: its self-justifying rhetoric. If something is normal, it is only normal for it to be so and therefore there is nothing to do but accept it, since it’s normal! But it doesn’t take long to figure out how much pain “normal things” cause many people just because they are born with or grow into traits that willingly and unwillingly put them outside of the norm. This immediately becomes a brilliant window for open discussion in class whenever I teach this play.

Years after I read it for the first time, I found the opportunity to start reading Equus with my students. I will never tire of seeing young minds becoming aware of the development in this story. At first, they are intrigued…or, for the more sensitive types, somewhat put off by the violent nature of its central premise. But before long, the heated debates start taking over the classroom—was Alan always like that? Is this a nature versus nurture problem? Could his parents have done more? Is Dysart being unprofessional? Is worship truly that essential in life? And then, from questions about the characters in the play, they always end up questioning themselves. So many students go to therapy and are on medication nowadays and the social demarcations of who is a normal person and who isn’t, who fits in the crowd and who stands out, are typical high school topics of discussion. This play always makes students question and revise some of the most assumed notions of their reality—is it truly a “good” thing to be “normal”? What price do we pay for the safety of conformity? What happens to people that do not conform? How are they treated and what do they feel? How much are parents to “blame” for our behavior? And then some even bigger questions: what happened to worship? What role do faith and belief have in a secular world? Can we simply label religious beliefs as mental illness or ignorance (like many secularists and atheists do) or is there much more to it than that?

His job was to bring these wayward young people to a functional normality, but what were they losing because of that? What precious, special rituals and visions was he excising from their beautifully individuated minds to make them fit in our everyday mundane existence? The boy worshipped Equus, the horse god, whilst Martin Dysart practiced his rituals at the altar of Normality, the god of the mundane.”

So many questions! And yet, that is exactly the whole point of reading a play such as this in class: to get students to ask questions they would otherwise not even think of. To question the assumptions of what they believe to be true and start engaging with reality on another level, expanding their awareness of what is going on around them, what is being done to them and what they inadvertently do to others. Equus sets the perfect playing field to dig deep into what makes us who we are and to question why we behave how we do. But it is not the only play I love teaching to raise questions on conformity and normality. Another play I enjoy bringing into the classroom fray also deals with a seemingly uncontrollable beast, yet, this time, within a funnier, absurdist context: Rhinoceros.

Where Equus gives me the opportunity to also introduce students to Greek theater and reference some Brechtian and even “Artaudian” elements seen in its staging, ​​Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros allows me to introduce them to the world of Theater of the Absurd. Though that may come later, first I like playing around with the most basic concept of this play: people turning into rhinos. Why? How? Can it be stopped? And yes, I do instruct the class to make rhino noises and stampede and bang and trumpet en masse; and yes, I do disturb other classes. Do fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds like this? Not at first. They give me the “are you kidding, we ain’t doing that” look. But I wear them down, find two or three goofier kids that are ready to play and the whole class will be doing it in no time. Suddenly, everyone is having a good laugh. There’s always a student in every class that gets it and says it out loud—you just like making us do weird stuff to make fun of us, don’t you? And I always say, yes, I’m sadistic like that, BUT I also think it’s important. 

Fifteen years of going to school to learn obedience and manners and respect do snuff out something inside kids that needs a stronger spark to reignite. Getting them to realize that they’re actually much freer than they think they are to be creative and noisy and wild is such hard work. We think of teenagers as rebellious or lacking control, but we’re so wrong. Most of them are completely subdued and broken by schooling, thinking only about grades and how they’re going to win respect or rewards from their parents, or how to get into a well-paid job once out of college. The ones that do not think like this feel like losers, and what one might think of their rebellion turns out to be nothing but self-hate and an absolute lack of interest or curiosity from an entire childhood of being told how to behave and what to want, whilst their own desires and interests are judged and condemned. The only ways they know how to rebel is in the cheaply manufactured ways they see on TV and the usual suspects which their own parents warn them about: alcohol, drugs, promiscuity etc. If there’s one thing I keep seeing in adolescent students, it’s a total lack of ingenuity and energy in their ability to rebel. They’re either conforming or broken. So yes, make them stampede and have them consider why one would turn into a rhinoceros!

I came to Rhinoceros at a similar time in my life as when I read Equus. Although both of them have an animal at the center of the plot, Equus and Rhinoceros are two very different plays. Equus, though visually and structurally quite nontraditional, unfolds within the realm of realism, attempting a kind of psychological detective story onstage, whereas Rhinoceros is an absurdist comedy where a small French town starts transforming into a herd of rhinos person by person—not realistic at all. Yet, though completely different in form and tone and effect, I immediately understood both plays to be brilliant even at a young age when I had very little clue about theater theory or criticism. What was I seeing that attracted and engaged me so much? I didn’t have the means to experience these plays performed yet, so it was not a matter of staging or performance and since the style was so different even on paper, it was also not a matter of theatrical convention. What I came to understand was that there was something in the plays I loved that I could see not only onstage whilst the play was going on, but even after, outside the theater, in the world around me, once that play was over. What I truly loved about theater was its ability to make me notice that which is not theater. What happened onstage was giving me the ability to see much more clearly everything that was happening off of it. Both Equus and Rhinoceros gave me this opportunity even as a teenager. For example, I cannot explain my love for Ionesco’s Rhinoceros without talking once again about Malta.

Fifteen years of going to school to learn obedience and manners and respect do snuff out something inside kids that needs a stronger spark to reignite. Getting them to realize that they’re actually much freer than they think they are to be creative and noisy and wild is such hard work. We think of teenagers as rebellious or lacking control, but we’re so wrong. Most of them are completely subdued and broken by schooling, thinking only about grades and how they’re going to win respect or rewards from their parents, or how to get into a well-paid job once out of college.”

Malta is a country divided by terribly sectarian party politics. There are two major political parties and huge blocks of the rather small Maltese population are entirely brainwashed by these political parties. When election time is near, this brainwashing becomes evident in terrible ways: quarrels and fights become a regular thing, whole families feel the tension, the streets become an insane circus of political propaganda and idolatry. The whole thing has to be seen to be believed. Once I read Ionesco’s play, I could totally see its effect on me out there in the streets of Malta. Come election time, everyone becomes a rhino. The fight not to become a rhino becomes a very real existential struggle as you find yourself saying things you might not have thought yourself capable of saying only months before. Family and friends expect you to take a side. People you thought you knew and respected suddenly start saying things that you abhor, the rhinos start transforming right in front of your eyes just like they do onstage.

Rhinoceros may be a play written by a Romanian playwright, set in a fictitious town in France, but after reading the play I saw the real rhinoceros off the stage, on the streets of my country and on its television channels, not in the theater. And this happens in all the plays I love. I see the play there onstage and I enjoy it, but then I see the play again, the real one, in everyday life, in the world around me and that’s where I realize that it wasn’t the theater that I was watching with such attention, but the world I’m living in. This is what theater does, it shows me my world and it allows me to see it vividly, clearly, in ways I could never see it before, so clearly in fact, that when I leave the theater, I see it still, now unmasked. Only after the theater do I truly start seeing the real world I’m living in. And it wasn’t only my world I could see—even more importantly, I could see the worlds of others.

Whether it was my colleagues at school or my teachers or my parents or politicians, the characters in all the plays I loved were already here, offstage, doing their thing, just as much as onstage. The world onstage was not something else from life, the world onstage was life itself. But since it is life onstage, it gives us a new opportunity to look at it in perspective, look at this microcosm and understand it without fear since this isn’t the world, it is a world, onstage, for these other people. It is the world these people onstage may or may not survive in. It is the world these people are struggling in. And the more I looked at things, the more I understood that this applies once again to our everyday life. 

Take the characters of Rhinoceros, for instance. Jean and Berenger are two friends who couldn’t be more dissimilar. Jean is neat and smart and proud of his reputation and sobriety. Berenger parties too much, drinks too much and is always late. He needs to put himself together, get his life in order; he knows this and is always promising to do so, especially since Jean doesn’t miss an opportunity to remind him. Yet the fate of the two characters by the end of the play brings out their inherently contradictory nature. Jean’s reputable professionalism does not protect him at all from transforming, in an especially brilliant theatrical climax, into one of the titular beasts right in front of Berenger’s eyes; and for all of his lack of control and disillusionment, as he repeats to himself that he will stop drinking whilst downing one shot of whiskey after another, Berenger is, ironically, the only character that does not “capitulate,” to borrow his own word, to the rhino phenomenon and remains the only human in existence by the end of the play.

Rhinoceros may be a play written by a Romanian playwright, set in a fictitious town in France, but after reading the play I saw the real rhinoceros off the stage, on the streets of my country and on its television channels, not in the theater. And this happens in all the plays I love. I see the play there onstage and I enjoy it, but then I see the play again, the real one, in everyday life, in the world around me and that’s where I realize that it wasn’t the theater that I was watching with such attention, but the world I’m living in.”

I have met many Jeans and Berengers in my life. The hordes of professional Jeans who are ready to “teach” you how to become more disciplined and stoic and make more money and be career-driven, yet at some point will always shock you with some horribly misogynistic or racist opinion that they reveal only once you get to know them more. And those that keep “scraping by” in life—maybe today they are slightly too hedonistic, tomorrow a bit too sensitive, at times unreliably uncertain of their ways, seemingly completely unable to control both their bodies and their minds—are always capable of some form of kindness and understanding, open for others’ opinions and feelings, empathizing with anyone in pain, whatever their shortcomings, these Berengers show themselves to always be fully human in whatever situation.

There are opinions, ways of thinking, that I do believe make one less human. Ionesco used the image of the rhino, an uncontrollable beast that runs straight towards its target, destroying everything in its path. He was using the analogy of the rhino to depict fascist regimes that are willing to block and destroy all other alternatives, all other ways of thinking or behaving in order for them to achieve their goals, usually goals of domination. I would go further and think of the rhino as itself analogous with something even less human than a beast, a machine. Thoughts and concepts, codes even, that embed themselves in us may render us less human and more machine-like. Ideas that make us look at other people and consider them as lesser, consider them as unworthy, or as dispensable. The very idea that makes us willing to cut off or marginalize or outright destroy others by seeing them as less human, makes us, in actual fact, less human and more machine-like. For isn’t the rhino in Ionesco’s play the ultimate rampaging machine? A machine that takes over reality and changes forever its constitution, from a reality where everyone has their own perspective, their own logical or illogical take on everything, their own worldview? One which at times is shared and at times not, to a reality where there is only one world, the world of the rhino, the new normal. Can’t we see this happening in our own lifetimes?

If anything, both these plays, Equus and Rhinoceros, show us clearly how there is no such thing as the world, there are only people with worlds of their own, everyone walking and talking and working under their own sky. Everyone going to different places when they need to rest, everyone feeling loved and hurt for very different reasons by very different people, everyone going their own separate ways once they die. For some, the world is a place full of evil and egotistic people that need to be controlled by strong rules and institutions or else everything will fall into chaos. For others, it is a world of soft and sensitive people living in fear of the few brutal ones. For others still, we are souls more than we are people, souls that need saving in a life after this one. And for some, only we may save ourselves, with an act of internal power; an act of the so-called free will, to control and channel our chaotic or beastly impulses into behaviors we may call virtuous. These may be four people inhabiting the same space, the same room even, yet they are living in four very different worlds. And when these people interact, their worlds collide. Sometimes gently, sometimes passionately and sometimes violently fatal. 

There are opinions, ways of thinking, that I do believe make one less human. Ionesco used the image of the rhino, an uncontrollable beast that runs straight towards its target, destroying everything in its path. He was using the analogy of the rhino to depict fascist regimes that are willing to block and destroy all other alternatives, all other ways of thinking or behaving in order for them to achieve their goals, usually goals of domination. I would go further and think of the rhino as itself analogous with something even less human than a beast, a machine.”

In these two plays, this collision reveals something extremely foundational, something we never think of as a problem and that is normality. Yes, I would say that the normal is dangerous, normalization is probably one of the worst ways in which we hurt others or allow others to be hurt without giving it a second thought. The normal becomes the standard by which a majority may oppress a minority without ever having to acknowledge that this is, in fact, oppression. The act of “fitting in,” the process of changing yourself or being changed by others, to become “acceptable” within the normal standards is an extremely painful one…unless you happen to have normal traits infused in you from a young age. This pain is not considered as a pain caused to you by the normal majority, but a pain which you are causing to yourself by not adopting the normal behaviors. If we had to truly acknowledge how much pain normality causes, we would be able to finally see the oppression.

Peter Shaffer in Equus shows us that we have created whole institutions to maintain this normality, with medicalization if necessary, when anyone shows too much of a shift away from “the normal.” Yet this is the extreme case at the far end of the continuum. What about the institutions of the daily maintenance of normality? The family, the school, the workplace—how many people always feel out of place and in distress whenever these essential social institutions enforce normality on us? The blame is always put on the one that is different, the one that does not conform, but never on the system, though it is very clear that the system is fundamentally wrong. It is a statistical fact that not everyone is going to be born with the necessary traits to be heterosexual and monogamous, yet for many societies and communities, the heterosexual monogamous couple is still considered the norm. It is also very clear that not all children develop intellectually at the same rate or have the same inclinations and mental faculties to perform well in all academic subjects, yet we still have a global schooling system that puts students in classes according to age and expects all of them to perform well in every subject at the same age. We know this is impossible, yet it is the norm. And we consider it a norm to have a percentage of “failures” that is acceptable. 

Peter Shaffer in Equus shows us that we have created whole institutions to maintain this normality, with medicalization if necessary, when anyone shows too much of a shift away from ‘the normal.’ Yet this is the extreme case at the far end of the continuum. What about the institutions of the daily maintenance of normality? The family, the school, the workplace—how many people always feel out of place and in distress whenever these essential social institutions enforce normality on us? The blame is always put on the one that is different, the one that does not conform, but never on the system.”

The damage done to the student that is growing up in a system that will label them a failure is not held accountable by the system, while all blame is simply put on the student. In other words, it is not the norm that is the problem, it is the individual. Same goes, of course, for the workplace. There are very clear norms of what makes money and what doesn’t. If the individual happens to have inclinations towards a role in society that does not make money, then the problem is the individual, not the norm. Because it is normal that a nurse or a teacher is underpaid but a movie star or a lawyer becomes rich. That is the norm. There’s no problem. The problem is the individual. And if the individual persists in being different, without submitting fully to the expectations of the norm, then they must be sick (or evil). This is where Peter Shaffer leads us in Equus. The play shows us how, in this case, all the previous attempts must have failed. Alan went through normal schooling, which was supposed to make him a normal boy, but it failed. His parents are a normal heteronormative monogamous married couple who were supposed to give him normal family and sexual values; this failed too. He had a normal job and normal hobbies that have clearly also failed in keeping Alan a normal young man.

And thus, we come to the extreme end of the normalization process: Alan has to undergo therapy with the High Priest of the Normal himself, the psychiatrist. But, and here’s the beauty of it, what if the High Priest suddenly sees a much more beautiful world he is destroying in this boy? The world of the Normal is nowhere near as awe-inspiring as the world of Equus and when they collide the High Priest is brought in to literally destroy one of them, the alien one, out of this boy’s mind; just like the Mycenaean priests eviscerated the insides of the children presented for human sacrifice at the fields of Argos. This play acknowledges the brutality of Normality. It acknowledges that over and above the very private pain each and every one of us has to suffer through our engagement with the contradictions and irrational twists and turns of our own natures, we also have to suffer through a pain that is intentionally inflicted upon us by the very society that is supposed to take care of us. This play brings to light how this very act of “care” that we entrust our society to give us is, in reality, nothing but a violent act of psychological and spiritual dismemberment and disfiguration all of us have to undergo, at times even physically, simply to appease normality.

But oppression is not the only danger of the normal. Ionesco in Rhinoceros shows that what is normality today might become abnormality tomorrow. All it takes is enough people to shift their behavior or ideas and suddenly the landscape of normality changes. This is in itself another terrifying prospect. Not only is normality brutal in its way of keeping everyone in line from the day they’re born, but you cannot even trust it to remain consistent. We see all the characters in Ionesco’s play struggle with this as the changes happen right in front of their eyes. In perfect absurdist fashion, rationality fails, as everyone tries to bring in some form of logic to the situation. But even the most intellectual of the town citizens end up talking gibberish in sight of the horrifying events taking over their society. Of particular note is the character Botard, who’s very easily compared to many reactionaries of today. As people start discussing the first appearances of the rhinos, Botard insists that it is impossible and no such thing happened. When Daisy tells him she saw the beast with her own eyes, he implies she’s lying to attract attention. Then he slips into conspiracy theory mode as soon as he sees the rhinos with his own eyes outside their office windows, and, when challenged that only a few minutes earlier he was just saying this isn’t possible, he quickly negates his previous position and switches his argument again.

There are very clear norms of what makes money and what doesn’t. If the individual happens to have inclinations towards a role in society that does not make money, then the problem is the individual, not the norm.”

The situation reminds me perfectly of how many reacted to Covid in those first few weeks of the pandemic. Total disbelief, followed by conspiracy theories, with the hospitals piling up the sick in the meantime. Why though? Why is it so hard to believe, even when your own eyes see the evidence? Because if you believe, you’ll have to change your whole world and, for some (I dare say for many), it is easier to resist the new information, to resist the change happening right in front of them, then it is to rearrange their whole understanding of the world they are living in. Even if that understanding is completely wrong. So many developments are threatening this normality today and so many decide to keep their heads in the sand. Whether it is climate change or the dangers of AI or the return of ultra right-wing fascism or the failure of capitalism or the escalation of warfare and even genocide, the signs are everywhere. The facts are numerous, yet too many would rather keep it “business as usual” with the belief in some cozy normality than face the truth: that this normality is about to change, very soon, with devastating effects for millions of people.

Normality is not something stable we may trust or depend on. That is its greatest lie. We are made to believe from the get-go that if we learn how to act normal and have normal goals and normal desires and lead a normal life, then things will play out “as expected” and we will be rewarded “as expected.” The normal is good, the normal is there to support us and make things easy. This cannot be further from the truth. You may spend your entire life fighting your own desires to fit into normality, a life choosing carefully what to believe and not to believe so as to always be a respectable member of your society, only for all of it to change in a couple of months. What you spent your entire life trying to believe and achieve is suddenly wrong, there’s a new normal, the carpet has been pulled from right under your feet and all that pain and self-sacrifice you’ve endured to become who you believe the world wanted you to become is no longer respected, nor acceptable.

These two brilliant dramatic masterpieces show us vividly the horror of all that is normal, for in a world where normality remains a standard of measure for humanity, there will be forever only two options, only two endings, for your story: you either join the masses and become another rampaging rhino, or you remain the sole, alien freak awaiting medicalization. Both of these endings are inhuman because normality is inhuman. For humanity to be truly liberated from this invisible oppression and move away from these two horrible ends, we need to do away with the very concept of normality itself.