Caligula

Playwright: Albert Camus
Adaptation: Shabyashachi Deb
First Staged on: 26th November, 2015

Synopsis of the Play
Camus and Caligula….
What shall it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul....?
Caligula might be mistaken at first for a historical play. The main character is lifted from history and many of Caligula’s excesses in the play come straight out of Suetonius’s first century work Lives of the Twelve Caesars. When the play is carefully read and put into the context of Albert Camus’s other work, however, its historical content is revealed to be merely a vehicle for his philosophical concerns. Actor and producer for the theatrical company L’ Equipe Camus, more specifically uses the figure of Caligula to explore the apparent “absurdity” of human existence. Some critics of the time thought it had more life and irony than any of the other plays. Indeed, irony and the concept of life itself make Caligula a very interesting play. Camus does not attempt to prove the validity of the absurdist viewpoint. Rather, he accepts it as a starting point for his explorations of how people live and how they ought to live. With Caligula, Camus sought to portray the results of a powerful individual pursuing nihilism to its ultimate conclusion.
Camus first pondered the idea of writing a play about the ill-fated Roman Emperor Caligula in 1935 and by 1938 he had finished a first draft which comprised three acts. During 1940 he continued to revise Caligula while at the same time writing novel The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus. By 1941 all three works were completed.