Albert Camus’s 1947 novel chronicling a
wave of what may or may not be bubonic plague in a city that may or may
not be Oran in Algeria is often taken as a musing upon how human nature
copes with incommensurate abomination, such as the then-recently-ended
dominion of Nazism. Neil Bartlett feels that in 2017 reminder is urgent
that, as Camus’ narrator testifies, “There is more to admire about
one’s fellow-citizens than to despise or despair of”, and so he has
adapted the novel and now directs this première production.
It is deliberately unshowy, beginning with five characters ranged along
a pair of long tables as if offering testimony to a commission of
inquiry, and never growing more complex than five persons, five chairs
and two tables on an otherwise bare stage. On occasions, soundscapes in
the background suggest the shooting of looters or the burning of bodies
en masse, but for the most
part the sound is both discreet and discrete, consisting of individual
piano chords left to decay with agonising slowness. (Apparently they
are taken from an aria in Gluck’s
Orfeo
ed Eurydice, mentioned in the novel but not this adaptation; a
wild part of me wishes they were from Scott Walker’s 1967 rendering of
the novel into angular, abrasive song.)
The characters – with one conspicuous exception – each choose to
attempt to ameliorate conditions for the populace or at least help the
city to survive in some form, for their own motives explained in
varying but never significant degrees or simply because it seems a
meaningful course of action. This may be potent in the form of a novel,
but when one literary critic describes their struggle as “undramatic”
it pretty much hits the nail on the head with regard to theatrical
presentation; moreover, as I say, Bartlett deliberately refuses to
inject drama where Camus offers none. This is an honourable, even
admirable approach, but I’m afraid not a helpful one in the
circumstances. I spoke of this work as a reminder of the strength of
human nature; however, in order to be reminded, we must both possess
the knowledge in the first place and be already alert to listen to this
rigorously unostentatious nudging.
Written for the Financial
Times.