THE PLAGUE
Arcola Theatre, London E8
Opened 11 April, 2017
***

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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