Books like Caligula and Three Other Plays

You had me at Caligula, Albert Camus, whose CALIGULA AND 3 OTHER PLAYS has circulated through my private library ever since I took my parent’s copy while in the depth of adolescent existentialism. I collected as much Camus as I could then, from his notebooks to the plays, essays and novels, again, mostly from my parent’s old college reading list that they kept shelved years later. I never read anything after THE STRANGER, but what young angry boy wouldn’t be drawn it the ducktail hairdo’d, cigarette-smoking rebel captured in the author’s profile? Now, nearing completion of my reading of Camus’ canon, I finally got around to these plays and they’re great. Again, Caligula, the mad emperor, the incestuous murder, what’s not to love? THE MISUNDERSTANDING, whose basic plot is first revealed in a newspaper clipping under the prison mattress of the narrator of THE STRANGER, is told as a Greek tragedy. STATE OF SEIGE is a more political reading of Camus’ novel THE PLAGUE and THE JUST ASSASSINS is about just that, a group of Russian revolutionaries plotting murder. What I loved about these plays was their artful artificiality. Never a fan of reading plays or screenplays, it may be time to reexamine that assessment, for I was attracted to the abstraction of their format. Camus’ didacticism is well suited to the medium, and, especially in STATE OF SEIGE, an almost Eugène Ionesco-like absurdist humor enlivens many scenes, something I’ve not encountered in Camus’ other works.