Rimini MEETING
the Opening Show

CALIGULA
and the Drama of Desire  
The product of twenty years of fine-tuning, with three re-writings, Caligula, the play Albert Camus worked on his whole life, will inaugurate the Rimini Meeting 2010 as the opening performance. Through the famous emperor, Camus gives voice to the heart-thawing yearning of humanity: “I want the impossible.” It provokes all of us to make a choice: to let go of this desire or let it make us protagonists in the drama of existence.

by Davide Rondoni

It took 20 years and three versions, a life’s work, because Caligula contains everything that Albert Camus had to say. He said it elsewhere, in admirable novels and other plays, essays, and controversies, but the character of Caligula gave body and voice to all the other words. He made them become “one,” a body and a face, a character who “makes you think,” as said on stage. “I want the impossible” is one of the most famous lines of the play.
The initial 1941 version, which is referred to here, is the richest and most filled with motifs; in the better known 1944 version–which was presented when France was under bombardment and therefore is very often read in terms of anti-Nazi politics–and then in the subsequent reworkings, until his death, the author sought to “pare down,” perhaps out of modesty, or tiredness, or stylistic economy. But here, precisely in the richness and exuberance of questions, one best grasps from what depths comes the dominant trait of the character created by Camus with the name of the famous Roman emperor: his ungraspableness, beyond the human power to comprehend, which is the supreme trait of all the other traits.
The play presents the ungraspableness of a man who, having lost his source of happiness, his beloved Drusilla, decides to be “logical” with finiteness and power. “Before knowing of death,” Caligula says in the first scene, “everything seemed believable to me. Even their gods, their hopes, their discourses. Now, no longer. Now, nothing remains to me but this futile power you speak of.” The apex of power, the emperor’s might, becomes the place of verification, one could say, of the possible freedom of man. For the man for whom everything is allowed, is the experience of freedom as satisfaction granted? Is the moon granted? Even if the past had granted him the moon, even if in his love for Drusilla he held that moon in his arms, the present no longer brings it to him. And not even the pain for his loss is the last word.
Caligula knows this well. There isn’t a last word, not even in the hardest and most profound experiences. Neither pain, nor baseness, nor cruelty–not even tenderness–have the last word on life, which is haunted by an absolute tension: “Here’s what haunts me. This going beyond…” he says like Dante’s Ulysses, full of bitterness. “In my sleepless nights I encountered destiny: you can’t imagine what an idiotic air it has. And monotonous …” In this confession, the words stun and at the same time consign life to an absurd suspension between aspiration and prostration.
Even to his closest interlocutors, to the plotters themselves, Caligula appears incomprehensible. He chose to be “logical” with this confession and with this alternation between yearning, the tension toward conquering something “impossible,” and the lapse into a kind of supreme indifference to everything. Therefore, he seems to play with slaughter, giving no importance to the death he strews around himself with equal irony and ferocity, and seems to undo every foundation for his own power, while he bafflingly implements the maddest arbitrary acts.

Into a dark wood. The Caligula of Camus finds himself at exactly the same point of departure as Dante. Losing the woman he loved throws him into a dark wood. The drama opens with the senators and court searching for him because he wanders like a madman after her death. Here, too, as in many masterpieces of literature, the story seems marked by an open account with destiny, a trauma–that is, a blow suffered that disrupts any possibility of a peaceful “pact with life.” “How can you continue to live with your hands empty, when before you grasped the whole hope of the world? How can you come out of it? [He breaks into a false, artificial laugh.] Make a contract with your own solitude, no? Make an agreement with life. Give yourself explanations, choose a tranquil existence for yourself, console yourself. It’s not for Caligula.”
Life for the emperor thus becomes “execution,” a term with the triple meaning of a theatrical performance, the hangman’s privilege, and inevitable action according to an established and inexorable need. The non-tranquility of Caligula contrasts with all the kinds of tranquility possessed by those who surround him: the senators, his lover, and his subjects. His disquietude leads him to wear the trappings of a grotesque Venus (goddess of love and the birth of the world)–or of the best of men, who, like God, thinks he can give innocence back to those who have committed a crime, as happens with one of his plotters, a kind of alter ego character, Cherea, who knows the same things about life as Caligula, but behaves differently. “I, too,” says Cherea, “I want to live and be happy. And I believe that the two things aren’t possible if you push the absurd to extreme consequences.”
The absurd, the presence of destiny, has that idiotic face. While Caligula believes that every action is therefore equal deep down, imprisoned in his impotence to have (again) the moon, Cherea instead accepts that for a conventional happiness in life, certain actions are worth more than others. But for the same reason he has to eliminate Caligula, who, more than being hated, is “inconvenient.”

“I’m still alive!” The text was born during the great theatrical and literary season of the absurd, the season of Beckett, Ionesco, and other great dramatists and writers. The devastating experience of the Second World War socially and politically marked this knowledge of destiny as “absurd,” and made life a poem on death. “I act it in my own way, every day,” says Caligula. Camus threw his strong, acute intelligence into the work, as well as his wounds and his enchantments as a man, his gaze that knew the desert and the colors of Algeria, and his knowledge of political and cultural struggle.
There are many moments that reveal to readers and the audience profound truths of life, inconvenient or disturbing as they may be. We are transfixed by Caligula’s final cry as he dies (“I’m still alive!”), almost like the gaze of the Medusa, petrifying. His cry etches in fire the existence of a human figure who desires the impossible and for this reason rejects every commonplace platitude, demanding that we “think.”  Viewers who don’t back away from this gaze have two options. Either they pity and detest Caligula, or they let that question pass through their own lips, let it overturn their own existence, and make them strange and ungraspable in the eyes of everyone else. This makes them “characters” in a drama where many have instead made their pact with life.