Caligula part of life's parcel

By GREG DIXON

In 1940 in Vichy, France, an unprepossessing waxed package tied with string arrived unannounced at the offices of the publishing house, Editions Gallimard.

Inside, once some minion had the snipped the twine and pulled open the stiff, greasy paper, three manuscripts were discovered. One was a novel called The Outsider. Another was a long essay, The Myth Of Sisyphus. The third was a play titled Caligula.

The quality of the work was as unexpected as the arrival. Between them, these works formed the core of a singular vision, three parts of a philosophical statement from a single Frenchman which began a spectacular career and founded a movement. The author's name was Albert Camus.

Nice story. And it's one that Scottish playwright David Greig loves. There is a cinematic quality to it, but that's not really it. It is evocative because, in a sense, literature and philosophy were different in the moment before the package turned up, and in the moment after. And Greig, whose new and lauded translation of Caligula opens this week at Auckland's Maidment Theatre, calls it amazing.

"What a package that was, to come from nowhere. No one knows this guy, he was just some sort of journalist. But with the delivery of that package, he went from a nobody to one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. I get very carried away by that brown package and what that moment must have been for Camus - 'Here's my work' - and for the publisher - 'I wonder what's in this?' "

What it was were three discussions about one thing, the idea of negation. In a short essay about the play, Greig says each work was about Camus' experience of the world as meaningless, random and ending in unavoidable death. As Caligula puts it in Act one, Scene four: "We die and we are unhappy."

But there is more to it than that, Greig says. Caligula, The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus explored how we go on living despite our knowledge of death and unhappiness.

Caligula, the Auckland Theatre Company's last drama for the year, is a young man's play, Greig says by phone from Fife.

It was written by a young man (Camus was 23) and has to be played by a young man - the ATC's lead Oliver Driver almost qualifies - and it speaks to the concerns of young people.

"Caligula is very like The Catcher In The Rye's Holden Caulfield, who is obsessed with truth and exposing phonies. Caligula is obsessed with exposing hypocrisy and people's lies. I think there is a kind of Puritanism in youth, that the most important thing is to be true, to tell the truth and be true to yourself. This is where I really love the play because what Camus does is he makes that very attractive. Caligula is undoubtedly the most attractive character on the stage, he's a delight to watch, everything he does is interesting or funny. But, of course, he is terrifying."

Well, yes. Caligula is one of history's most popular monsters by dint of the pungent and ribald history by the Roman writer Suetonius. In his The Twelve Caesars - a collection running from Julius Caesar to Domitian - Suetonius makes a play for the title "world's first tabloid journalist" as he greedily and luridly picks over the remains of some of ancient history's most outrageously cruel and perverse tyrants, including Gaius, whose nickname was Caligula or "Little Boots".

Among Suetonius' juicy gossip about the madman: he planned to make his favourite horse Incitatus a consul (or magistrate), he opened a brothel staffed with the wives of Rome's most important men and he slept with his sister Drusilla. Caligula's favourite line - a damned good one for a despot too, though it was not his own - was "Let them hate me, so long as they fear me".

In sum, he made his predecessor Tiberius, and the later but equally bonkers Nero, look like paragons of moderate, benign rule in comparison.

All of which presumably explains why Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione was able to fund his notoriously awful, partly-pornographic film version of Caligula's life in the late 1970s (original screenplay: Gore Vidal) and partly helped the success of Robert Graves' novel and BBC series I, Claudius (Claudius was Caligula's uncle).

But Camus' Caligula, written in 1938, is a much more complex creature than a nutter with a thing for nags, incest and sex with other men's wives - and the play is no mere history. Camus had certainly read his Suetonius, but the historical Caligula simply provided a yarn on which Camus could weld his ideas.

"The particular niceties of Rome or the historical record ... it was almost as though Camus' own writing made them less important than the world that was created. And that is the world of a palace in which there is a young emperor and an old guard.

"There is a sense in which Camus created Caligula as a character to explore the suicidal impulse, the impulse that says there is death and unhappiness, how can the world be this cruel? Camus gave life to Caligula to really push that idea to its limits, and to explore it and make it as attractive as possible ... then he can create the writer Cherea and one or two of the other characters to try to counter that idea.

"That's a very interesting dynamic for the theatre because it means you're constantly bouncing back and forth, you're pulled between two ideas that are equally powerful and strong.

"The character of Caligula is also an embodiment of things that many of us have felt or feel. He is given such life and it's as if a part of us is up there on stage, that embodiment is so vivid."

The play did have a political resonance when Camus wrote it, and for its first audiences, in 1945. Today the randomness of terrorism might stand for the madness of tyranny.

"The philosophical question posed is: if you don't believe in God and you have absolute power, what can you do? Now that sense of absolute power is in the air at that time. I think the sense of incipient horror is also.

"Whether it's Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, there is an arbitrary abuse of power going on. So I think that is there, politically. But also I think it's about despair. To put it at its crudest, I think it is a play about depression."

Camus, however, once called the play a tragedy of the intelligence. And that tragedy, Greig concludes, is that intelligence is not necessarily going to help us on our way in the world.

"Or to put it in a more English way, you can be too clever by half. Depression is about turning one's own resources against oneself. I think that is what's happening to Caligula, he is given a fierce intelligence and so therefore it's almost impossible to save him.

"He desperately wants to be saved, but of course the thing that will save you is not intelligence, it's emotion. It is not rationality, it's irrationality. That's why I say it's a young man's play.

"When you are young you want everything to be black and white, and the understanding that emotion is actually reason enough in itself is not enough."

Performance

*What: Caligula, by Albert Camus; new translation by David Greig

*Where and when: Maidment Theatre, Sep 23-0ct 23