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| "Caligula is Camus’ first completely original
and undoubtedly his best and most enduring play." (E.H. Freeman, The Theater of
Albert Camus) |
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| All the immediate evidence suggested that Caligula, published
in 1944 and first produced in 1945, was a
later work, for instance, than Le Malentendu which had been published in the
same volume as Caligula: Le Malentendu preceded Caligula on the stage
as it did in their joint first publication; Caligula is more polished theatrically
than Le Malentendu; furthermore, where Le Malentendu reflects
the same rather gloomy preoccupation with the world's hostility to man that one finds in
Camus’s earliest essays L'Envers et l'Endroit, Caligula, by placing the
emphasis rather on how man should rebel against the world's hostility, is more consonant
with Camus’s thought in the latter part of the war and early post-war years. (I.H.
Walker, "The Composition of Caligula." Symposium, Vol.xx, #3.) |
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| E.H. Freeman expresses two pieces of conventional wisdom. Walker
agrees with the positive evaluation of Caligula but thinks that the play’s
polish is partly due to the fact that it is not Camus’ "first" play.
Even in scholarly circles the narrow question of chronology is not exactly a live issue
these days. Still, clarifying Caligula’s complicated evolution does cast light
on an interesting aesthetic question. Germaine Bree, for example, notes that Camus’
"reworking"of Caligula over the years reflects a "certain plasticity
of the medium which lends itself to modifications." In the case of Camus, moreover,
the creative tension between the demands of writing a play and the exigencies of
performing it is much sharper because he had extensive practical experience in dealing
with the mass of variables involved with producing a play. In fact, Camus had originally
planned for Caligula to be performed by his own company, Theatre de l’Equipe,
and to play the lead role himself. In writing this play, therefore, Camus had various
incentives to exploit the plasticity of the medium to the fullest. |
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| Camus had the idea of writing a play about the Caligula myth in
1936 but only produced a sketch of it. He finished the "first version" in 1938. |
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| The play is first mentioned in Camus’s 1936 notebooks as Caligula,
Or The Meaning of Death, but only two of four projected acts are sketched, and the
content of neither finds its way into the first performed or published version.
Because Camus eventually eliminated any action representing Caligula’s accession to
the throne and his early policies (act one) or his relationships to his three sisters and
political elite (act two). What he retained from the original sketch in 1938’s first
completed version of the play was the simple, but dramatically potent idea of a
"transformation" in Caligula during his disappearance after Drusilla’s
death. Caligula’s return and the revelation of this transformation became the subject
of act one, and fixed the dramatic structure of all subsequent versions: act two takes
place three years later and portrays the effect of Caligula’s madness on those who
surround him; act three shows the beginnings of a conspiracy while Caligula swings between
megalomania and suicidal despair; and act four sees the conspirators pushed over the edge
by Caligula who embraces his own assassination. |
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| The "second version" of Caligula was published
in 1944 and then performed in 1945. The relationship between the "first" and
"second" versions is not easy to sort out. |
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| Two facts seem to be universally accepted: that Camus finished
the first written version of Caligula in 1938; and that during the war he
completely revised it into the version which was published in 1944 and was the script for
the first performance in Paris, 1945. Germaine Bree’s discussion of the play tends to
assume a sharp difference between the two versions, and concentrates on delineating the
artistic superiority of the latter. Walker, on the other hand, is much more concerned with
clarifying the stages in which the difference took shape (although he, too, agrees that
the 1944 version was a superior play). On the basis of his examination of Camus’
notebooks, that is, he concludes that the 1938 "first version" was not simply
reworked in 1939-40 into the "second version" published in 1944 (Bree’s
assumption). Rather, by 1939 Camus had again revised the play by making the character of
Caligula a much less admirable person. Throughout the rest of the war, Camus completed yet
another revision in which this change was taken further: Caligula still possessed a basic
"truth" about life, but was represented as a "menace" who chose a
radically "wrong path" in response to that truth. |
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| Camus produced a "third version" of Caligula in
1958. A critical evaluation of this revision partly depends on one’s understanding of
the play’s evolution over 20 years. |
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| By the time Camus had put the finishing touches on this defining
representation of Caligula, Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding) had most
certainly been written and performed on stage. So Walker is probably right -- it is
inaccurate to call Caligula Camus’ "first" play. And his suggestion
that Camus’ comments to the contrary consisted in an exaggeration intended to
distance himself from Jean-Paul Sartre’s "existentialism" also rings true.
Yet Walker’s analysis also entails the important aesthetic point that it was
Camus’ first-hand experience of the terrors of absolute power during the war that
motivated and shaped his persistent tinkering with Caligula’s character. This
knowledge undoubtedly influences one’s appreciation of the so-called "third
version" of the play -- the 1958 revision made for the opening of the "Nouveau
Theatre de Paris." Again, Germaine Bree describes well Camus’ substantive
artistic changes for the 1958 production, but in developing "allusions to the
contemporary scene," she thinks Camus diminishes the play’s dramatic
impact. She has "a feeling that the ‘real’ Caligula will always be
the 1945 Caligula." Looking at the 1945 version from the point of
Walker’s scholarship, however, perhaps we would not be so resistant to the character
of later revisions? |
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| English readers probably come to Caligula through the
widely available Stuart Gilbert translation of the 1944, "second version." The
script made available to directors by Samuel French, on the other hand, is Justin
O’Brien’s adaptation of the 1958 "third version" for the 1960
Broadway debut of Caligula directed by Sidney Lumet. Philip Thody’s excellent
critical edition of Caligula in French contains a very helpful appendix in English
in which Camus’ various revisions are noted. Copyright as well as scholarly issues
must be confronted by any director interested in producing what he or she conceives to be
the "best" version of the play. |
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