La Passion du théâtre: Camus à la scène (review)

This stimulating volume groups fourteen essays by eminent Camus specialists under four subdivisions: ‘L’Œuvre dramatique de Camus’, ‘Camus, praticien de théâtre’, ‘La Fortune scénique de Camus en France’, and ‘La Fortune scénique de Camus à l’étranger’. Sophie Bastien introduces the study with a grandiose claim for Camus’s theatre. After conceding that it has never been considered aesthetically revolutionary, and noting that no play by Camus finds a place among the one hundred and thirty in Michel Corvin’s Anthologie critique des auteurs dramatiques européens (1945–2000) (Paris: SCEREN-CNDP, 2007), she affirms: ‘Pourtant, dans le champ de la pratique théâtrale, il connaît une popularité extraordinaire et toujours grandissante’ (p. 11). She thus creates an awesome challenge for her collaborators, rising to it herself in her own chapter — albeit with an adaptation of his fiction — ‘Adaptation théâtrale de La Peste au Québec’. Performances of Camus were rare in francophone Canada before 1993, but since then Le Malentendu, Caligula, and Les Justes have been enthusiastically received, particularly by young audiences. More than on the original plays, she focuses on Mario Borges’s adaptation of La Peste, clearly a spectacle as imaginative as it was courageous: Borges makes Father Paneloux a representative of the hardline Québecois ‘Église obscurantiste et sclérosée, aveugle devant de grands problèmes sociaux’ (p. 193), with the plague being updated and assimilated to AIDS. In Russia too, Camus got off to a late start: Caligula in 1998, preceded only by Requiem pour une nonne in the 1970s. Since then, sadly but perhaps predictably in the era of Putin and the Chechen rebellion, he has been appropriated politically. Eugène Kouchkine informs us that Kaliayev and comrades, in a 2003 Moscow production ‘[qui frôle] la vulgarité d’une farce excentrique’ (p. 222), have been assimilated to loutish, vodka-drinking terrorists prepared to kill at random, hence the cynical inverted commas of Les ‘Justes’ (in the Russian translation of the title). Equally informative in the ‘fortune scénique’ half of the volume is Vincent Siano’s account of his ambition to put on the whole of Camus’s theatrical work — not excluding L’État de siège, it would seem (p. 169) — as part of a youth education programme. Courageous furthermore in that he invites (to Lourmarin no less!) des jeunes en difficulté dont beaucoup d’origine maghrébine. Mark Orme confirms that student productions, in the UK as elsewhere, will always be a way in which the theatre will survive, and quality professional productions of Les Justes and Caligula occur at regular intervals. Lydie Parisse argues persuasively that even Le Malentendu can be made to work, given an immense input of technical invention, as in Montpellier in 2009. It falls appropriately to the doyen, Raymond Gay-Crosier, to explain how the plays and their many variants have been handled in the new Pléiade complete works. His Annexe II lists two unpublished plays, Antoine Bailly: l’impromptu des philosophes and (for radio) Les Silences de Paris (mentioned also by Bastien in her Introduction, but in a mere footnote). An essay about them is all that this thoroughly useful volume lacks.