Albert Camus' expression of "tragedy in modern dress" portrays men struggling with the emotional and psychological facts of alienation by means of man-made justice. Caligula (from the play of the same name, written in 1938, first performed in 1945), apprehending the alienation inherent in the human condition, exercises absolute power to match the absurdity of the world, inevitably to find the same terrible face of self-separation in his own mirror. Martha, Jan, and their mother, in Le Malentendu (1944), murder and misunderstand in a search for self-definition under "the injustice of sky and climate." The Plague divides the men and women of L'Etat de siège (1948) from their own dignity and, in the end, from their lives, by exercising a justice as logical and inhuman as Caligula's; and the terrorists of Les Justes (1949) attempt to redeem the myth of absolute justice with their lives, sacrificing the relative truths which alone are available to man. Those who seek self-identity fail to recognize the futility of such a task in an absurd universe. Those who deal in justice misunderstand the "pathos of distance" between mankind and the good. (p. 42)
Alternating between a desperate lyricism which is well known to readers of his nonpolitical essays (L'Envers et l'endroit, Noces, L'eté) and the enigmatic parables of his widely known récits (L'Etranger, La Peste, La Chute), Camus' plays embody his thought in dramatic action at once tantalizing and obscure. Gabriel Marcel's judgment, that the theater of Camus fails as a dramatic presentation of his ideas, is frequently echoed, and not always, one must note, by critics who are primarily concerned with the possibilities of financial success. "The essential words," wrote Robert Kemp, theater critic for Le Monde, "are pronounced at moments when the drama, the brutal drama … absorbs the spectator's nervous energy. It is a fine art, no doubt, to mingle thus action and thought, not to separate them," but, he concludes, "the most meaningful words pass so quickly and remain so mysterious that they only brush our consciousness." Germaine Brée questions the strength of the concrete situation to carry the full weight of the thought. To date, the only major staging of Camus in America has elicited mixed comment, but the accusation of oratory mixed with soliloquy, theatricality with intellectualism, seems to predominate. (pp. 42-3)
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