New Play on Broadway

Caligula (adapted from the French of Albert Camus by Justin O'Brien) scrutinizes one of the most nefarious rulers of history, whose one excuse for being a monster is that he was almost surely a madman. Camus wrote Caligula in 1938, an ominous time of madmen and monsters, but even then Caligula was not in any usual sense tendentious. No self-made, power-mad Brown-shirted or Black-shirted or Red dictator, Caligula was bred to the purple; endowed with unlimited power, what he came to thirst after was unlimited "freedom." Camus' Caligula, whose once very human blood has turned to bile, and from bile to venom, would have the impossible: he would dispense with love, reason, friendship--every bond uniting humanity. He would as passionately destroy as other men create, would claim to be a god that he might act the beast.

With cynically inverted logic and with suppurated sensibility, Caligula degrades, tortures, rapes, murders those about him.

He alternates appalling melodrama with grisly farce, is now a kind of rancidly self-communing Hamlet, now Venus in a gold wig. The more inhumanly homicidal his acts become, the more inherently suicidal is his mood. Boundless egotism shatters into nihilism, limitless freedom festers into self-imprisonment, until Caligula's assassination at the hands of conspirators is really a welcomed assignation with death.

Camus's effort to hold a monster up to nature and draw a sane moral from a mad career produces a startlingly simple one.

As Camus himself phrased it: "One cannot be free at the expense of others." To extract from such sick, vast-scaled cruelty and violence such mere copybook wisdom seems at the same time elaborate and insufficient. In any case, what turns Caligula into a pathologically fascinating figure keeps him from being in any fundamental sense an interesting one. In much the same way, Caligula has its brilliant bursts of theater, its explosive moments of action, its lightning flashes of revelation, but no sustained drama and almost no inner development.

Cleanly translated by Justin O'Brien, strikingly directed by Sidney Lumet, and with Kenneth Haigh giving an unstinting, unflinching performance in the title role, and Philip Bourneuf and others lending helpful support, Caligula yet falls short of the mark and too often goes slack.

This is in part because, for being so unfettered, Caligula's dream grows oddly one dimensional. It is in part because a dehumanized hero is, in morality-play fashion, surrounded by flatly allegorical types who seldom seem human either; in part because, where the talk does not resemble oratory, it resembles soliloquy.

Mixing theatricality with intellectualism, Caligula is at once too much a mere stage piece--and too little.

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