Nowhere but in France, it seems, do men of letters whose greatest talent clearly lies in other genres devote so much of their creative energy to the theatre. The Golden Age of Corneille and Racine, kept alive by an ever-growing number of French repertory companies, stands constantly before the writer, challenging him to try to rival its inaccessible perfection…. Albert Camus' passion for the theatre was lifelong, from his participation in the Algerian Worker's Theatre in 1936 to his tragically short reign as director of a government sponsored avant-garde company in 1959. In the midst of the virtually unanimous acclaim accorded him as novelist and thinker during his last years, Camus continued to see himself primarily as a man of the theatre in search of new approaches to the technical problems of the stage. And in a brief program note written for his Paris production of Requiem for a Nun, he admitted that his greatest ambition was to create a form of tragedy indigenous to our age. In each of his own plays there is, as Germaine Brée has pointed out, a solitary hero marked for destruction by a fatality which he himself has created. This seems to be the stuff of which tragedy is made. It is now generally acknowledged, however, even by those whose unrestrained admiration for the man has often paralyzed their critical faculties (one reviewer wrote that "to read Camus is to want to shake his hand") that Camus did not realize his ambition.
The technical flaws in Camus' works for the stage are apparent to every reader or spectator. The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) is weakened by unconvincing dialogue. The characters speak in those polished aphorisms ("He has gone into the bitter house of eternal exile … neither in life nor in death is there any peace of homeland.") which look fine in print, in the novels of Gide, Malraux and Camus himself, but which sound strangely hollow in the theatre, where abstraction is the playwright's greatest enemy. Caligula … fails because of Camus' predilection for the theoretical, for misplaced lyricism and pretentious rhetoric. Nothing much happens on the stage during The Just Assassins (Les Justes); the characters pursue those endless philosophical debates, so gripping in the novels of Dostoyevsky but so deadly here and in Camus' stage adaptation of The Possessed. State of Siege (L'Etat de Siège), a dramatization of the myth of the plague, is his most ambitious and least successful play. Written for Jean-Louis Barrault, it contains a variety of dialogue ranging from lyrical to burlesque, stylized choreographic movements by the chorus, complicated lighting effects, and music by Arthur Honegger. (pp. 106-07)
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