When Albert Camus' drama Les Justes (The Just) was first produced at the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris in December 1949, it was widely criticized for being too intellectual. "A play? No. An ideology. Living characters? No. Demented brains," wrote Jean-Jacques Gautier in Le Figaro after the opening night. More than 50 years have elapsed since its premiere, yet the staging of philosophical concepts over fully fledged characters and situations is no less an issue today than it was then.
Patrick Dooley
Sharp on Cue: Beth Donohue as Dora Doulabov.
Details
The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby (at Martin
Luther King Jr.), Berkeley
Related Content
More About
Camus based The Just on real historical events -- the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, uncle of the Russian Tsar, by members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in February 1905. Focusing on the preparations for (and aftermath of) the high-profile attempt on the Grand Duke's life by five party members, the play fleshes out the author's ideological position on the nature of revolt, a topic that had featured prominently in his earlier works, like La Peste and L'Etat de Siège. Camus saw revolt and its expression through political action as the best solution to the problem of living in an unjust world. But he also believed that revolutionary pursuits should be calculated to diminish the sufferings of human beings as a whole, not exacerbate them.
Riddled with bold sentiments like "There is honor in the revolution" and "It wasn't enough to merely speak out against injustice. You have to give your life fighting against it," the play delivers rhetoric that alone is enough to make us want to hit the vodka. Then there's the issue of the characters. Camus views Ivan Kalieyev, The Just's protagonist and the revolutionary charged with the task of throwing a deadly bomb at Grand Duke Sergei's horse-drawn carriage on its way to the theater in Act Two, as heroic, not only for his struggle to reconcile the drive for justice with the killing of innocent people -- a first attempt on the Grand Duke's life fails when the target unexpectedly turns up at the theater accompanied by his young nephew and niece, forcing Kalieyev, who refuses to shed children's blood, to abort the mission -- but also for his willingness to pay for the death of others with his own life. The author wants us to empathize with Kalieyev and his comrades, but showing their heightened sense of personal sacrifice and their ethical wranglings doesn't transform these revolutionary symbols into real characters. In his program notes to a 1955 production of the play at Comedie de l'Est in Paris, Camus wrote, "In any case, 'psychology,' ingenious anecdotes, and pungent situations, though they may often entertain me as a theatergoer, leave me indifferent as a playwright." That's fine for the seminar room, but not for the stage. A play doesn't necessarily have to be entertaining, but it should at the very least hold the audience's attention.
In including the above quote in its own program notes for a new production of The Just, Shotgun Players hints at its understanding of the challenges inherent in staging Camus' drama today. Accordingly, director Patrick Dooley's stylish production does its best to cut through the hyperbole. The Players are helped to a degree by Tom Hoover's new translation, which, though mainly respectful toward the trumpeting oratory of Camus' original, goes some way towards varying the tone. For instance, Hoover gives the acerbically witted, unfortunately named Foka, a prisoner who comes to sweep Kalieyev's cell as the condemned revolutionary awaits the gallows, a strong, colloquial voice, quite distinct from that of Camus' original. After three acts of gung-ho speechifying from the terrorists, Hoover's Foka (performed laid-back-tough-guy-style by Eric Burns) comes as a huge relief. I found myself wishing the translator had taken similar liberties with other characters.
The precision of the acting and the mise-en-scène also helps to tone down the philosophizing. Every time the doorbell rings -- a weighty sound effect that approaches the prophetic proportions of the bomb going off at the end of Act Three -- the actors react with choreographed sharpness. Though the stage directions call for crying and other explicit emotions, the actors -- particularly those encumbered with large chunks of rhetoric like Beth Donohue (Dora Doulabov), John Nahigian (Stepan Fedorov), and Taylor Valentine (Kalieyev) -- play down the Sturm und Drang.
Unfortunately, while the Players' approach renders Camus' staged abstractions more palatable, it sways our sympathies in a potentially counterproductive direction. Kalieyev and his comrades appear more intangible than ever, and the sheer temperateness of Dooley's production compounds Camus' ideological ravings, ultimately estranging us from the "just" revolutionaries with whom we're supposed to empathize. Paradoxically, as the only character allowed to express a truly personal point of view, rather than that of the party or the state, the widowed Grand Duchess ends up being the focus of our sympathies. Dressed in black and portrayed with quiet conviction by Michele Shoshani, the Grand Duchess intimately responds to the death of her husband. When visited by her in his prison cell, Kalieyev uses every conceivable argument to justify his terrorist actions, from quarreling over semantics -- "What crime? I remember only an act of justice" -- to reminding the widow that he spared the children. But every justification crumples like a dead leaf in the Duchess' hand; she even admits to disliking the Grand Duke's nephew and niece.
foam order.com
