Complexity

But was the insidious feeling of dissatisfaction once the spell was broken caused by faults in the play or faults in the production? A play must be judged on its own terms, inherent in its text and dramatic form—but this play posed a large problem for its audience even before the problem of "successful production" could be considered.

Some of us are tuned in to Dostoevsky, determinism, Russian gloom and Chekovian silences, others know Camus's existentialism, plagues, politics and corruption in modern society, but what we were confronted with was an unhelpfully ambiguous English translation of Camus's French, a dramatic adaptation (the selection serving its own purposes) from the Russian novel. On this wellwatered family tree of a play were grafted other difficulties, perhaps unavoidable; a multiplication of styles of acting — naturalism (Stamislavsky, which suits the mood if this is a Chekov-like play), stylisation (appropriate for ritual-type conventionalised drama), even at times an approach to highly-mannered comedy of burlesque. This variation in acting styles could become a good thing, if the play itself demanded it in order to transmute the action into an audience-involving whole, but this intention and consequent justification never became apparent.

In fact, since Camus's conception of dramatic form here includes the conventions of narrator-participator and an acting space which is left free enough for an actor with the assistance of mime to visit houses in two parts of a town and talk with people in the street on the way, a greater degree of stylisation in the acting could have appropriately given the play a formal unity.

The set was entirely adequate; its only fault was perhaps an over-attention to detail—the dangling lampshades which cast odd shadows, the chairs and sticks which actors fell over, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, the narrator's precarious triangular perch (which distracted rather than intensified attention).

Thus the production left us constantly in doubt as to the terms on which the play asked to be considered. Was it high tragedy, extra-subtle comedy, or melodrama? It achieved its dramatic intensity not so much through involvement with a character's intellectual or emotional problems and personal growth of awareness, but through climax after climax of a visually and melodramatically exciting kind. Tension was achieved, pace was maintained and the actors were admired for managing to overcome the basic ridiculousness of many of the pseudo-tragic lines they were faced with. The performance was, somehow, a success. But not the serious success that I fear was intended.