What abundant laughter attends Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros! Dominic Cooke's alluring production of this Theatre of the Absurd black comedy - a classic allegory - was first seen at the Court with Laurence Olivier in 1960.

It reminds us how accomplished British actors are at sending-up Gallic pomposity and pedantry. Ionesco's purpose, though, is deadly serious. In 1938 the Romanian-born writer noticed how his friends succumbed to Romania's fascist Iron Guard as if seized by a contagion. He described them as akin to rhinoceroses.

His play cynically views the human drive to conformity and, perhaps influenced by Hitler's occupation of France, an ostrich-like refusal to face the truth. "They're not fundamentally aggressive," claims Paul Chahidi's Dudard, as rhinoceroses run wild through the town.

At first comedy rules. How cruelly pleasing to watch Ionesco's blinkered inhabitants of a seriously provincial French town when the first rhinoceros, unseen but thunderous as a Tube train, crashes into the central square. The damage to Anthony Ward's unevocative and underdeveloped set is an omen of turbulence. Although townsfolk are quick to anger, outrage and anxiety, they take time to reach a panicky awareness that the rhinoceroses are metamorphosed human beings.

Two scenes, one preposterously amusing, the other shimmering with black comedy, mark the process. An employee's wife (Alwyne Taylor's delectable Madame Boeuf) arrives at the grimly bureaucratic office where the placid hero, Benedict Cumberbatch's Berenger, labours. She is pursued by a rhinoceros that she realises is her own husband.

Berenger's best friend, Jasper Britton's Jean, who first appears in a three-piece suit and a fit of smug, self-adoring belligerence, later undergoes a swift physical and vocal transformation that marks his rhinocerisation.

Britton's powerfully articulated performance, a comic and dramatic bull's-eye, is not matched by Cumberbatch's. As Berenger he effectively registers amiability and gauche passion for Zawe Ashton's Daisy but not real terror when he takes a defiant stand to resist becoming a rhinoceros.

Cooke, fortified by Martin Crimp's wittily amusing translation, works best in the fields of black comedy. He has a clear eye for menace, too, with the chilling final tableau of rhinoceroses surrounding all exits in Berenger's wrecked apartment.

The text, though, needs trimming. The prolonged satirical-absurdist arguments, which make laboured nonsense of logic, need severe pruning. Even so Rhinoceros remains utterly captivating.

�œUntil 15 Dec (020 7565 5000).