Romania. Eugen Dimitri Ionescu, better known as Eugène Ionesco, was born in Slatina, Romania. He is one of the most important playwrights of the theatre of the absurd. Rhinoceros depicts an imaginary epidemic of "rhinoceritis", a disease that frightens all the inhabitants of a town and soon transforms them into rhinoceroses. A tragic and comic metaphor of the rise of totalitarianism at the dawn of the Second World War, it shows the dangers of conformism, which, by allowing individual thought to disappear, encourages the establishment of totalitarian regimes.