All posts tagged absurd

Breath by Samuel Beckett (1969)

In 1969 Kenneth Tynan wrote to Beckett asking for a contribution to his hit stage revue, Oh! Calcutta!, which made headlines because of the extensive use of full-frontal nudity.

Beckett replied with the stage directions for what must be one of the shortest plays ever written. Some versions barely last a minute. Longer ones stretch it out to two minutes. Here are the directions:

Curtain.
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in 1.) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.

Rubbish No verticals, all scattered and lying.
Cry Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.
Breath Amplified recording.
Maximum light Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.

That’s the full text in its entirety. In other words, the stage lighting comes up on a pile of rubbish for a few seconds, there is the distant sound of the cry of a newborn baby followed by a big breath in accompanied by the light growing, followed by a big breath out as the light fades, a repeat of the cry of a newborn baby, then fade to black.

There are quite a few versions on YouTube and one of the funny things about them, taken as a group, is how few of them adhere strictly to Beckett’s directions, but feel the need to add and elaborate and embroider the bleak simplicity of the original.

Absurdist joke

On one level it’s clearly a sort of joke, in the same sort of absurdist spirit as John Cage’s 4’33” or Marcel Duchamp’s urinal – a reduction of theatre to almost its minimal possible components in order to see what the bare bones look like, to see what the most reduced idea of a theatrical piece can be. And yet at the same time be a work which is interesting in its own right – just like John Cage’s 4’33” or Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

The unsustainability of a nihilistic attitude

At the same time it’s also a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the nihilistic attitude (I hesitate to use the word ‘philosophy’ because although Beckett likes to refer to canonical philosophers and difficult philosophical ideas in his works, he is not a philosopher and doesn’t propound a philosophy) expressed in the famous line from Waiting For Godot:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

In other words, we are born into a heap of rubbish, cry at our entrance, our entire existence can be summarised as a couple of breaths, and then there is the second cry of our death. Here’s another version, clearly inspired by Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi.

But as I remarked of that line in my review of Waiting For Godot, this nihilistic worldview is simply not true and everyone knows it’s not true. Lots of people live long, complex and fulfilling lives. People play computer games and chess, make discoveries, run theatres, write plays, go to art festivals and galleries and football matches, go scuba diving and skiing, build houses and cars, drive across America, join the army, join the navy, go to school, go to church, have children, grandchildren and quite a bit more.

It takes a special kind of imagination to see human life as simply a matter of two cries of pain and a handful of breaths set against a pile of rubbish, and a special kind of mindset to think this could possibly be true. It takes quite a bit of education to be quite this self-deluded.

Of course as a simplified allegory of human existence, as a symbol of a particular worldview, then fine. Paint what you like, draw what you like, write what you like. But as a depiction of the so-called ‘human condition’, it is profoundly untrue.

The unstoppable human instinct to tinker

And this is exactly the point driven home when you watch the half dozen or so short productions of Breath on YouTube – not one of them does it straight, just films Beckett’s simple directions; almost all of them feel compelled to add and embroider and elaborate in all kinds of ways, whether it’s bringing in the music of Philip Glass or a load of slides about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

Now there is where you have the real human spirit or experience – the endless urge to tell stories, tell anecdotes and jokes, harrow with horror, set to music, hum, sing, dance, plunge into grief, gossip about work colleagues, keep a diary, share instagram photos.

The multiplicity of productions which betray Beckett’s simple spartan and crystal clear stage directions, they’re the ones which tell you about ‘the human spirit’, the spirit which can’t stop itself adding, embroidering, inventing, yakking on, adding a new bit, what about some music, hey let’s project some slides, shall we add wheels, how about a flashing light on top and a siren. Humans: incorrigibly gabby.

In fact this betrayal of Beckett’s vision occurred right at the start, when the creator of Oh Calcutta, Kenneth Tynan, gratefully received Beckett’s contribution but thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit boring, let’s adapt it to suit the vibe of our bravely nude stage show’ and added a number of naked men and women to the production. As Beckett’s biographer, Deirdre Blair put it:

‘In one of his few displays of public anger, Beckett called Tynan a “liar” and a “cheat”, prompting Tynan to send a formal notice through his lawyers that he was not responsible for the travesty, which he claimed was due to others … Beckett decided the incident wasn’t worth the argument and dropped it.’

When you think about it it’s a delicious irony, because lovely naked young men and nubile young women, powerful symbols of fertility and sex and the Life Force are pretty much the exact opposite of the nihilistic and bleak ‘philosophy’ the piece supposedly exemplifies.

Drop it, Sam. Walk away. It’s just people, Sam, doing what they do, adding bells and whistles and go-faster stripes. I know you intended it as a searing indictment of the human condition, but the producer wanted boobs and bums.

Beckett as writer not ‘philosopher’

I am interested in Beckett, I am reading my way through his complete works, because I think he is an extraordinary writer – he conceives of language and the scenarios language can conjure and the tension between what can barely be called its ‘subject’ and the wrecked tatters of language it is conveyed in, with extraordinary originality. He repeatedly takes language to entirely new places, creating a kind of powerful and original dynamic interplay between form and content which is unparalleled.

But I don’t think his subject matter is true, good grief, what an idea. It is merely the subject matter he needs to create in order to develop the linguistic effects he is interested in. The white boxes which the narrative finds its protagonists stuck inside in the so-called ‘skullscapes’ or the people crawling through the mud in How It Is are objective correlatives or symbols or scenarios or setups which justify the extreme linguistic experimentation, the phenomenally strange and eerie way he handles the language.

The producers of the Beckett On Film project asked artist Damian Hirst to film it but even though part of an attempt to produce canonical versions, Hirst’s version simply omits the baby’s cry, the vagitus at beginning and end. It’s almost as if the text’s brevity and simplicity taunts producers to over-ride it.

The triumph of stage directions

And, quite obviously, this micro-drama also represents the triumph of stage directions over content. It’s easy to find critics and commentators lauding Beckett as among the greatest prose explorers of the 20th century, and I would whole-heartedly agree. But not so many people make the just-as-obvious point, that he was one of the greatest writers of stage directions.

All of the plays contain very, very detailed stage instructions specifying every aspect of the set, of props, what the characters are wearing, the kind of lighting, exactly how they move, how they speak or whisper or pause.

There’s the story of the hapless Americans who had the bright idea of staging Endgame but setting it in a disused New York subway station. Oops. It is comic and instructive to read the outraged response this prompted from Beckett himself, who tried to get the production stopped and, when that failed, got his lawyers to ensure that the following note was inserted into the programmes for the production:

Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me. My play requires an empty room and two small windows. The American Repertory Theater production which dismisses my directions is a complete parody of the play as conceived by me. Anybody who cares for the work couldn’t fail to be disgusted by this.
(quoted in the Wikipedia article)

What I’m driving at is that many of the later plays can be seen as the triumph of stage directions over prose content. Thus the short work Come And Go really consists of the tightly choreographed movements of the three women. The two Acts Without Words cease to have any dialogue at all, and are what they say on the tin, mimes. Similarly, Quad consists of the wordless movement of four humans dressed in shrouds through a complex series of positions on a stage set conceived as a mathematical quadrant, not really resembling anything we associate with the word ‘play’.

Even some of Beckett’s most famous works can be seen as the triumph of mise-en-scène over content. The only thing most people know or remember about Happy Days is that it’s about a woman trapped up to her waist in a mound of sand trying to look on the bright side of the situation.

Similarly, it’s not really necessary to understand any the text spoken in Not I to be dazzled by the beautiful simplicity of having the stage (or camera) focused entirely and only on a disconcerting close-up of the yammering mouth.

And Krapp’s Last Tape can be summed up as a knackered old man listening in anguish to tape recordings of his much younger, more confident self.

Prose there might have to be, language might be required, to make plays go, to allow a production to go ahead. I’m just suggesting that the stage setups and the fantastically detailed stage directions Beckett supplied to all his dramatic works is at least as, and sometimes maybe more, important than the supposed semantic content of the texts, their so-called ‘philosophy’ and so on. The setup and the actions are the play.

So, to repeat, a minute-long work in which we simply hear the cry of a newborn baby set against a rubbish dump, is brilliantly minimalistic, reduces Beckett’s so-called philosophy of life to one piercing image – but is also a kind of epitome of his theatrical practice.

The law of unintended adaptations

Last point. I suppose there is a cheeky connection between Beckett’s minimalism and the way so many of the interpreters on YouTube and elsewhere have felt free to embroider it. Maybe Beckett’s work survives and his reputation endures precisely because, contrary to his emphatic and repeated directions, the very minimalism, especially of the later plays, allows directors and producers a surprising amount of creative freedom.

More, as I hinted earlier, it’s almost as if the super-precise stage directions are tempting producers to ignore this or that aspect of them, and to improve on Beckett’s vision – to make it contemporary, make it diverse, bring it up to date, make it relevant to the age of social media, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and so on.

There’s some kind of perverse law of human nature at play, almost as if the more precise Beckett’s directions became, the more free later generations of producers have felt to bugger about with them,

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 6, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 6, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/breath-samuel-beckett/

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett (1961)

Beckett wrote a lot of plays, 19 of them according to the Beckett On Film project, more than 30 if you include the seven plays for radio and the various fragments and dramaticules.

But only a handful of them are ‘full length’ enough to sustain an evening at the theatre, being: Waiting For Godot (1953), Endgame (1958), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961).

To verify this assertion I made this table based, in a very rough and ready way, on the duration of the plays as filmed for the Beckett On Film project (indicated by an asterisk) or according to the durations of the most popular recordings on YouTube.

Play Duration   
*Waiting For Godot (1953) 120
*Endgame (1958) 84
*Happy Days (1961) 79
All That Fall (1957) (Radio play) 70
*Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) 58
Beginning to End (1965) (Television production)   49
Embers (1959) (Radio play) 45
Words and Music (1961) (Radio play)   42
*Rough For Theatre II 30
*Footfalls (1976) 28
Quad I and II (1980) (Television play) 23
Cascando (1961) (Radio play) 22
Eh Joe (1967) (Television play) 20
*Rough for Theatre I 20
*A Piece of Monologue (1978) 20
*That Time (1975) 20
Rough for Radio I (Radio play) 17
Rough For Radio II (Radio play)
*Play (1963) 16
*Act Without Words I (1957) 15
*Rockaby (1981) 14
*Not I (1972) 14
*Ohio Impromptu (1980) 12
*What Where (1983) 12
*Act Without Words II 11
… but the clouds … (1977) (Television play)   10
*Come and Go (1965) 8
*Catastrophe (1982) 7
*Breath (1969) 45 seconds 

Obviously, performance times can vary quite a bit from production to production, so these figures are the opposite of definitive, they are merely indicative, but the result tends to show two things:

1. Only a surprisingly small handful of Beckett plays amount to anything like an evening in the theatre, and that’s why they’re the ones we’ve heard about. The great majority of Beckett’s plays are short, often very short.

2. The last evening-length drama he produced was Happy Days in 1961. From that point onwards, for the next 23 years, Beckett’s plays become progressively shorter and can only be staged in an evening of such fragments, as additions to the other plays. That’s why the Beckett on Film project was so very useful, because it allows us all to see stagings of ‘dramas’ which are so brief or fragmentary that they might never be staged in a theatre in our lifetimes. Many of them are almost like thoughts or sketches for dramas, hence the word dramaticules which is often used about them.

Happy Days

The premise of most of even the full-length Beckett plays is simple. There is generally just the bare minimum of characters required to enable a dialogue. Thus:

  • Waiting For Godot is mostly about the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon
  • Endgame similarly is mostly about Clov and Hamm
  • Krapp’s Last Tape is (ingeniously) about the relationship between an old man and the tape recordings he made of his thoughts as a young man

And Happy Days follows the formula by being entirely about just two characters, Winnie (a woman of about 50) and her husband Willie (a man of about 60). Like Godot it is a play of two halves and, exactly like Godot, if the first half finds the characters in a bad plight, part two shows a significant deterioration in their condition.

Thus the first half of Happy Days finds Winnie buried up to her waist in a mound of sand or rubbish. Surreally, she completely ignores her plight, accepting it all as completely normal, wakes up and starts fussing about her day. She fusses about her handbag and applies her makeup, all the time throwing comments at her husband who is lying on the other side of the mound, out of sight of the audience, apparently reading a paper, mostly ignoring her endless prattle, occasionally grunting a reply.

In part two the curtains open to reveal Winnie now up to her neck in sand or detritus or whatever the play’s producers choose. Throughout her fiddly fussy prattle she repeats the refrain that it is ‘a happy day’, a lovely day, mustn’t complain, can’t grumble, and so on.

In other words, Happy Days is a classic epitome of the theme of decline and fall, degradation and entropy, which characterises all of Beckett’s work. It’s also typical, in a slightly less obvious way – to anyone who’s read quite a lot of his works, as I now have – in the extreme banality of the content.

Many of Beckett’s works, from the early novels through to the late mimes and dramaticules, may be off-the-scale in their avant-garde experimentalism. But it is striking how utterly thumpingly banal much of the actual content is. Characters prattle on about catching their train, or how tight their boots are, fuss – as here – about their lipstick and makeup, remember inconsequential details of their former lives, love affairs, sitting on Charlie Hunter’s knee, her first kiss – a torrent of trivia.

Now, learnèd professors and Beckett scholars have managed to find in his works a steady stream of references to many aspects of Western philosophy, quotes from Spinoza, rebuttals of Descartes, critiques of the Rationalist tradition, and so on. They argue that these fragments and snippets provide a kind of foil against which is set against the bustling twaddle of Winnie’s monologue. And even a non-philosopher like myself can spot it when the characters suddenly switch register and quote a bit of Shelley, or are suddenly dazzled by a memory or phrase which clearly indicates a moment of deeper reflection or emotion…

Nonetheless, the most powerful impact of so many of these works is of a prattling inconsequentiality completely at odds with the dramatic and stricken situations in which the characters find themselves.

My reading of Albert Camus is that this is what he meant by The Absurd – the yawning gap between human beings’ longing for meaning and purpose in their lives and the steadfast refusal of the universe to give them any – in fact its tendency to block and frustrate petty human wishes at every turn.

But there’s another feeling you get from watching a play like this which is that the mis-en-scène is striking and imaginative, like a surrealist painting, like a mind-blowing picture by Max Ernst. But as soon as the characters start talking there’s an odd sense of letdown and anti-climax. Very rarely does anyone in a Beckett play say anything which really lives up to the astonishing starkness of the scenarios he’s thought up.

Almost all the common Beckett quotes come from Waiting For Godot which was not only the turning point in his career as a writer, but somehow summarised the best of the preceding prose works, their complex interweaving of themes and registers of language, in their peak form. For this reason, maybe, it is by far the longest of his plays. It feels like he’d stumbled across the new format and tried to pack everything into it, with the result that it is by far the richest play to read and study, there’s so much going on.

Less so in Endgame, which is still long and complex and (hauntingly) set in an apparently post-apocalyptic world. A lot less so in Krapp’s Last Tape, one sad old man in his garret. And again, here in Happy Days, the scenario is astonishing, but then the actual words you listen to are, well, a bit disappointing.

It’s amazing that just 31 pages of text result in an hour and twenty minutes of stage time. It shows the importance of:

  1. the numerous pauses throughout the play
  2. the often elaborate stage ‘business’ that is involved in Beckett plays, in this case Winnie’s fussing and fretting with her handbag and makeup

Film version

This is a very good film version of the play starring Rosaleen Linehan as Winnie and Richard Johnson as Willie, directed by Patricia Rozema.

We watch a woman buried up to her waist in sand woken by an alarm bell, saying her daily prayers, brushing her teeth and then nattering on and fussing about make-up and medicine while her husband sits wearing his boater occasionally reading out bits of his newspaper (Reynolds News, according to Winnie towards the end of the play).

Maybe the point is how most people comfort themselves with endless natter and chatter while ignoring the reality of their ‘plight’, in the view of the existentialist school of philosophy, thrown into a godless universe, abandoned, stricken, trapped in lives of pointless repetition and futile routine.

Going on

Just like Malone and the Unnamable, and as Vladimir and Estragon frequently point out that they’re doing, maybe Winnie talks interminably simply to be able to go on with life, but the obvious objection to this entire train of thought is that it only makes sense if you think that ‘going on’ i.e. carrying on living, is an enormous challenge which requires the tactic of endlessly prattling and telling yourself interminable stories to make it at all manageable.

But language is not an abstract form like painting or music. Language is a means of communicating, and that is what becomes, ultimately, so wearing about the Beckett Trilogy of novels, that the reader submits to reading so many hundreds of pages which convey almost no information at all.

I understand the point (I think): that language in all of Beckett’s works is not intended to convey any important information – or maybe that all language is equally meaningful or meaningless, and that, therefore, language’s ultimate purpose is as a flow of sound designed to comfort the speaking characters, and insulate them from the ‘horror’ or ’emptiness’ of existence.

And thus the entire play amounts to yet another enactment of the basic principle defined in the talismanic phrase which ends the 1953 novel, The Unnamable:

You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

In Winnie’s characteristically more verbose rendering:

So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do – for any length of time. [Pause] That is what enables me to go on…

‘That is what enables me to go on’. Happy Days is cast in a different setting, in fact in a different medium from The Unnameable (stage compared to prose). But it is the same idea. The identical idea. Repeated. Again and again. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. I’ll tell myself stories. That is what enables me to go on…

Details

The ringing bell reminds me of the whistle blown to torment the protagonist of Act Without Words I or the whistle Hamm blows to summon Clov in Endgame.

Credit

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett was written in English in 1961, and the author then translated it into French by November 1962.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

Leave a comment
by Simon on December 2, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 2, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/02/happy-days-samuel-beckett/

Caligula by Albert Camus (1938)

‘This purity of heart you talk of – every man acquires it, in his own way. Mine has been to follow the essential to the end… Still, that needn’t prevent me from putting you to death.’ [Caligula laughs.]
(Caligula p.58)

Camus began writing a play about Caligula in 1938, completing a three-act version by 1941, and a final, four-act version was published in 1944. The play was part of what the author called the ‘Cycle of the Absurd’, along with the short novel The Stranger (1942) and the long essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).

Theatre of ideas

Theatre in France has always been more philosophical and intense than in England. The tragedies of Jean Racine (1639-1699) have a purity and a terror with no match in English literature.

Like much modern French theatre, Caligula is a play of ideas, or maybe of one idea, in which the characters mostly exist as types or foils for the psychological and philosophical debate.

The character of Caligula

Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus was the third emperor of the Roman Emperor. ‘Caligula’ means ‘little boots’ and was a nickname given him by Roman soldiers when he was on campaign as a boy.

Caligula succeeded his adoptive grandfather, the emperor Tiberius, in 37 AD. For the first eight months of his reign he ruled wisely. But after his sister, Drusilla, died in 38, the 24-year-old Caligula abruptly changed character, becoming, in the words of the Roman historian, Suetonius, ‘a monster’. He instituted a reign of terror, having leading patricians murdered, their sons killed and their daughters forced to work in public brothels.

So much for the historical record. In Camus’s hands Caligula becomes a demented philosopher-emperor who takes most of the leading philosophical themes of Camus’s time and pushes them to extremes. He seeks:

a philosophy that’s logical from start to finish. (p.19)

but in seeking it, time after time reveals the absurdity at the core of human hopes and ambitions.

Take the theme of freedom – Caligula realises that, by having complete power over every human in the Roman Empire, he has in effect become ‘the only free man in the world’.

Or the idea of ‘power’ – for Caligula the only point of having power is to abuse it i.e. to have the power to use power senselessly and in the face of all rational limits or protest.

Or take Camus’s central preoccupation of the 1930s, the Absurd. By carrying his wishes to their logical conclusion, Caligula demonstrates at some points the absurdity of human wishes; at others, the absurdity of having wishes which the real world cannot deliver. Right at the start of the play he says he wants the moon, he wants to possess the moon, why can’t he have the moon? — establishing the absurdity of his romantic longings, the impossibility of his desires.

So the play isn’t much concerned with character, let alone incidental touches of humanity or humour. Everyone talks as if they’ve just swallowed a philosophy textbook, and almost everything Caligula says seems designed to be quoted in a textbook about existentialism.

I wish men to live by the light of truth. And I’ve the power to make them do so.

All that’s needed is to be logical right through, at all costs. (p.7)

This world has no importance. Once a man recognises that, he wins his freedom… You see in me the one free man in the whole Roman Empire. (p.12)

A man can’t live without some reason for living. (p.19)

One is always free at someone else’s expense. (p.25)

I’ve merely realised that there’s only one way to get even with the gods. All that’s needed is to be as cruel as they. (p.37)

There’s no understanding Fate; therefore I choose to play the part of Fate. (p.38)

Logic, Caligula; follow where logic leads. Power to the uttermost; wilfulness without end. (p.43)

What I want it to live, and to be happy. Neither, to my mind, is possible if one pushes the absurd to its logical conclusions. (p.45)

Other artists create to compensate for their lack of power. I don’t need to make a work of art; I live it. (p.56)

The only variation from the sweeping generalisations about life and the universe, fate and freedom, is when Caligula’s soliloquies rise to a pitch of hysteria reminiscent of Racine’s tragedies:

I want to drown the sky in the sea, to infuse ugliness with beauty, to wring a laugh from pain. (p.14)

Ah, if only in this loneliness, this ghoul-haunted wilderness of mine, I could know, but for a moment, real solitude, real silence… (p.32)

Not many laughs here (although Caligula’s cynical brutality occasionally amuses him). Instead the play sustains an exhausting tone of continuous hysteria, reflecting the subject matter.

Structure of the play

The play doesn’t so much have a plot as consists of a sequence of scenes each one designed to give examples of Caligula’s insanity i.e. his realisation that he can do anything he wishes. Thus we have scenes where he humiliates the patricians (the ruling class of Rome) who live in a constant state of terror; he forces them to invite him to dinner, forces them to let him sleep with their wives. If he feels like it he has their sense murdered, and, when he’s bored, he has them poisoned or executed on a whim.

For Caligula, with absurdist logic, points out that, since all men must die, it is only a question of when not if and therefore it doesn’t much matter whether it’s now, or tomorrow, or in ten years’ time.

This is an example of him pushing human logic right to its limits and exposing its absurd consequences. But it is also – when you step away from the play and ponder his speeches and actions along these lines – very immature. Sure, all men must die. But that makes life all the more precious, all the more worth saving, all the more worth living well. To point out that all men must die and then burst into tears about it or howl against the injustice of fate are both essentially immature, almost childish, responses.

The message of Shakespeare’s tragedies – that it’s the readiness, the ripeness, the preparedness to die, without hysteria or melodrama, which counts – is the philosophy of a much more worldly-wise and mature man.

Camus, born in 1913, was only 25 when the first draft was completed, much the same age as Caligula, who achieved all the mayhem which made him notorious for all time, before he was finally assassinated by his own bodyguard at the age of 28.

The play’s climax

Having tortured, executed, debauched and manipulated as many men and women as he can, Caligula discovers that the Total Freedom he sought is empty, brings him no joy or release.

And so, when he discovers there is a plot to kill him, he carries his Absurdist logic – his repeated theme that life is meaningless – to its logical conclusion and chooses to ignore it.

Right at the very end of the play he murders Caesonia, the only women who ever loved him, strangling her despite her pleas of love, and then allows himself to be stabbed to death by the conspirators.

Assessment

The play works examines, dramatises and takes to the limit the absurdist logic inherent in the figure of ‘the tyrant’ – the human who has complete power of life and death over everyone else in his society.

Assessing the play amounts to assessing whether the dramatisation, the showing-forth of Caligula’s madness in the series of short scenes which Camus has assembled, is adequate to the theme.

Well, there’s no doubting that many of the scenes are powerful – there is no shortage of cynical cruelty and occasional black humour but – despite much intense melodrama – the play is actually not very dramatic.

Gérard Philipe was just 20 years old when he starred as Caligula in the successful 1945 production of the play

Gérard Philipe, just 20 years old when he starred as Caligula in the 1945 production of the play

There are no reversals or surprises, Caligula just sets out on a quest to become a monster – and succeeds. He starts off spouting high romantic ambitions to conquer the moon and outface fate and achieve his freedom, and the play never departs from this high, airless, often hysterical tone.

Which makes it all the more surprising to learn that Caligula was a great success when first staged in 1945 with the 20 year-old actor Gérard Philipe making his name in the title role.

The success or failure of plays is much more complex than poems or novels. It is dependent on innumerable contingent factors like the staging, costumes, lighting, music, on the ability of the actors, and, above all, on whether the production captures the often intangible spirit of the times.

Theatrical history is littered with plays which were smash-hit sell-outs in one season or year and which, only a few years later, seemed dated, badly made, creakily plotted or over-written, their one-time success now inexplicable.

Philipe was a talented new face, that probably helped, theatre has its own fashions and rising stars. But it also seems reasonable to guess that the play’s absurdity matched the post-war mood, as people tried to rebuild lives (and cities and countries) devastated by years of was, and as the broader culture caught up with the mood of black nihilism unleashed by the terrible revelation of the Nazi death camps, and almost immediately afterwards the revelation that humanity had created new, atomic weapons which could potentially wipe us off the face of the earth. Not to mention, of course, the lingering memory of the last days of the Nazi regime and the mad rantings of the megalomaniac at the heart of it.

All these factors maybe explain why what appears to us, now, 70 years later, such an extended exercise in shrill adolescent hysteria, at the time perfectly caught the mood of a culture and a continent in ruins.

Credit

Caligula by Albert Camus was published in France in 1944. This translation by Stuart Gilbert was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1948. Caligula was brought together along with translations of Cross Purpose, The Just and The Possessed in a Penguin edition in 1984. All quotes & references are to this Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other Camus books

Reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Algerian war of independence

1 Comment
by Simon on September 21, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, France, French literature, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 21, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/09/21/caligula-albert-camus/

%d bloggers like this: