Though largely remembered as a novelist, there was a time when the writer Albert Camus was known more for his plays. The son of a working-class Algerian family, whose father was killed at the Battle of Verdun in 1914 when Albert was a baby, Camus would come of age as a man of the theater: a natural, charismatic leader with interest in material production and all elements of stage production: light, staging, acting, directing. As a playwright, the young Camus was never, in a sense, isolated—despite recurrent bouts of tuberculosis—an endowment of commission from the local Algerian Communist Party (where he was, from first to last, involved in large scale organization and organizations) allowed him to be an active one.
Rehearsals for his work would take place in Algiers at the Actors’ Home or at the Communist Party’s headquarters, to then be performed in the city’s Théâtre du Travails (or “Worker’s Theater”). According to his biographer Todd Olivier, Camus directed by “thunderous decree” micromanaging every aspect of his productions, yelling at tardy actors, and demanding professionalism from his largely amateur casts. From his open and numerous affairs with actresses, Camus acquired a mixed reputation within his own company (the father of one actor would escort his daughter to and from rehearsal to shield her from Camus’s advances). A talented, precocious director capable of filling a house, Camus’s vision was too idiosyncratic for his patrons: the more militant communists in the company found, for instance, that Camus’ adaptation of Gorky’s The Lower Depths was not sufficiently communist in spirit.
Though Camus may not have been an ardent communist, he drew from (or outright borrowed) from legendary directors who were like Erwin Piscator, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Konstantin Stanislavski, and, his adaptation of Andre Malraux’s The Human Condition, opened in the shabby, but packed Théâtre du Travail with an audience exceeding a thousand people. The ethos of Camus and his band of upstart leftist actors reminds one of the work of the Group Theatre operating contemporaneously in New York City–with the only obvious difference being the latter’s lasting success and influence over American drama. An outside observer to Camus’s Algerian theater in 1937 may have even imagined that they had discovered another Harold Clurman, the Group’s co-founder, rather than a future novelist.
In a new translation of Caligula and Three Other Plays, Ryan Bloom, who had previously translated Camus’s Notebooks, takes on the writer’s dramatic output: four plays written between 1938 and 1950, along with Camus’ own prefatory notes. Three of the four texts, Caligula (about the fall of an emperor), State of Emergency (about a plague in the city of Cadiz), and The Just (about the Russian revolutionaries of 1905) are serious and sweeping political tragedies which take on the topics of tyranny, pandemic governance, and revolution respectively; the relevance of these texts to the politics of the 2020’s is self-evident and perhaps explains appearance the first new translation of these plays in decades. The fourth work, the hypnotic, but uneven The Misunderstanding—written between 1942 and 1943 and intended as an allegory for the moral depravity experienced by Europeans during the second World War—is set in an isolated village where a mother and daughter run a small hotel where they rob and kill their guests.
Taken together, Bloom’s translations remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors. Canonical primarily as a novelist and secondarily as an essayist, Camus’s dramatic works are clearly an attempt at grand synthesis of existential thinking and classical forms. Despite his aesthetically radical influences, however, what Camus pursued in his own plays was inexplicably passé. Sensing that the Algerian landscape and the French language could produce a neo-neo-classicism, he envisioned a theater informed by Aeschylus, Malraux, and Jean Racine in equal turn.
While Camus’s literary heroes were largely nineteenth and early twentieth-century novelists—Tolstoy and Dostoyesvky, and even Faulkner among them—his sense of the possibilities of theater were nostalgic at best and decidedly traditional. While Camus shared the tragic humanism of both Chekhov and Beckett, as a playwright and director, he was neither a naturalist like Chekhov or ultra-modernist like Beckett; while his themes were contemporary, Camus largely skipped the twentieth century’s experiments in dramatic form and would remain uninterested in them for the rest of his theatrical career.
It is unfortunate then, given Camus’s talent, that these attempts at dramatic synthesis fall short. Bloom’s excellent, clear and subtle translations of Camus x-ray his limits as a playwright, and by extension, the limits of neoclassicism. Camus’s syntax and dramatic structure both seem cut off both the undertones and overtones of speech, pitching the dramatic language towards the quavering and declamatory rather than the interior. As Bloom admirably explains, in his own introduction, Camus’s plays are written in the highly formal form of literary French, removed from the colloquial ordinary and vernacular. As a result, thought and emotion are largely externalized: Camus’s characters tend to state precisely what’s happening to them as it’s happening—nothing more, nothing less.
Take the title play, for instance, developed in Algeria, completed in 1939 and revised for production in Paris in 1945, fuses mid-century philosophical concerns with decidedly classical dramatic modes; Caligula is effective in portraying the relentless logic of absolute power corrupting absolutely. Straying far from the historical record, Camus’s Caligula mixes unremitting violence with constant philosophizing; Camus’s emperor sees himself not quite as a man-made tool for the expression of raw power: the divine empire incarnate. Caligula, the character, teetering on the verge of insanity, issues death sentences to demonstrate the reality of his power; he is a solipsist who kills just to see if anything exists outside of himself, and his absolute dominion. For example:
Caligula
It’s funny. When I’m not killing, I feel so alone. The living aren’t enough to people the universe and to keep the worries at bays. When all of you are around, you make me feel this limitless emptiness I dare not look into. I’m only at ease when I’m with my dead.
Like Simone Weil, whom he admired, Camus sees 20th-century totalitarianism as an echo of the machine-like, and often brutal Roman Empire; as an allegory of modern totalitarianism, Caligula serves as a canny stand-in for Hitler or Stalin. Yet, while it’s entirely possible, even probable, that this style, even in translation, is more effective performed than read, it can make reading through these plays a tedious experience (even if you admire Camus as a writer). Camus simply did not develop a dramatic idiom that allowed his characters to speak with anything approaching naturalness (even in translation you can always see how Ibsen or Chekhov struggled—in the sense of pushing their artistic limits—to show how modern people can think, feel, and converse on stage).
Here’s another example from State of Emergency (which is structured almost like a darker Our Town) respectively:
Diego
Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh, you fool. You’ve lost, I tell you. In the midst of what appear to be your greatest victories, you’ve already lost, because in human beings–look at me–in human being there’s a strength you can’t diminish, a burning madness swirled with fear and courage, deeply ingrained and forever victorious. It’s this force that’s going to rise up, and when it does, then you’ll know your glory was nothing but smoke.
Why did one of the wisest and most humane of the literature’s modern moralists fall into such a dull dramatic voice? As Bloom explains, Camus wrote his plays in a uniformly “tragic tone” that “took precedence” over any other kind of aesthetic imperative. As a result, “the backcountry peasant and the misunderstanding speak in the same way as a grand duchess or Roman emperor” creating, in Camus’s own formulation, a “calculated distance,” which feels, after awhile, like it simply conceals an absence of closeness. Even though, as Bloom (again, ably) points out, Camus was much more flexible as a translator of dramatic texts into French, his own conception of original drama remained rigid (and as a screenwriter, it’s worth noting, a collaboration to work with Bresson failed spectacularly).
Long after he became a world famous man of letters associated–even synonymous–with the intellectual life of post-war Paris, Camus remained a stodgy, even naive, tragedian and theater-maker, who conflated tone with effect and pathos, who saw in the Algerian seascape an echo of the Attic Greek, and who longed to write a great tragedy in the mode of Aeschylus. But neoclassicism had already exhausted itself by Camus’ time, suspended as he was between Chekhov and Beckett, and it is the primary reason that before his death and still today, he had not nor likely never will enter the first rank of dramatists. The canon of drama remains closed to those who do not create a language of their own.
