CAMUS FOR TROUBLED TIMES

A few minutes after we have concluded this interview,
writes Richard Hodkinson, its subject, Dan Horrigan,
phones me. “Listen,” he says, “don’t tell people we
think the play’s about terrorism.”

“But it is about terrorism,” I counter, “we’ve just spent
half an hour talking about this play and terrorism. You
think it’s about terrorism.”

“Yes,” says Dan, “but we don’t want people coming to the
play already thinking that it’s about terrorism.” “It’s about
revolutionaries planning to blow up an aristocrat for political
ends,” I say, “that’s terrorism.”

“But even so, we’d rather you didn’t emphasise the terrorism
angle.”

So there you go. Albert Camus’ The Just, playing at the
White Bear Theatre this month. And absolutely not about
terrorism.

Except that it is. And not.

As ever with Camus, the action of the play is secondary to
the philosophical questions it throws up, and the moral
dilemma presented in The Just is pertinent to the terrorist
act but certainly not exclusive to it.

As Horrigan, the show’s director, puts it:
“We’re living in a sensitive time where our access to
information is massive and where we see things going on
around us that ask questions about who we are, about the
effect our actions have on other people. So if you ask anybody
about terrorism, of course they have an opinion on
it, but we are more interested in finding out what it might
be like to be someone who has to go out and murder for a
political goal, which is a different question altogether.”
What is it about the moral maze constructed by Camus
that makes this drama so appealing to Horrigan?

“When we started putting the production together,” he
says, “we were most interested in the question of whether
there are limits beyond which you really shouldn’t go to
achieve your political goals. Camus is very clear in that he
believes there is a line that should not be crossed.
“The play is based on historical fact, and I think that
Camus’ admiration for the socialist revolutionaries comes
from the fact that they really agonised about where they
should and shouldn’t draw the line.

“Camus also had an association with the political left, but
he was among the first people to realise that Russia under
Stalin was not working and had brutalised its own people
and that the dreams that had been fought for by the original
revolutionaries had been compromised and perverted.”
But surely, there is a particular problem today in attempting
to present a terrorist in a morally positive light today?
Is it possible for a modern audience to view the play in
the same way as Camus’ contemporaries might have
done?

“I don’t think so,” says Horrigan. “I can’t really speak for
the audience of the time, but now there appears to be no
measure, no limit to the lengths people will go to achieve
their ends. Planes flying into buildings – before it happened,
inconceivable. Now conceivable. That we should
be waging war on a massive scale and that a large part of
the world’s population thinks of us as terrorists, also
inconceivable until the last few years.

“So when you look at a play that asks the question ‘how
do you put yourself in tune with murder?’ you have to ask
further questions such as whether there is ever justification
for taking up arms to achieve a political goal.”
Horrigan’s production is billed as The Just by Albert
Camus in a new version by Benjamin Polya, a writer who
was faced with the thorny problem of how to present
issues with such a raw contemporary relevance without
compromising the vision of the original play. Does
Horrigan think he’s been successful?

“We think that the new version accommodates the 21st
Century view. It’s not a black and white argument, and we
include some historical facts that didn’t make it into
Camus’ play in order to encourage our audience to view
the dilemma as something the characters agonise over.
These characters are appalled by the choices they have to
make, they’re living in a kind of hell, so they’re already
suffering for the crime they’re about to commit. So the
new version of the play had to make sure that an audience
living today could empathise with those dilemmas.”
But aren’t Camus purists going to be appalled by the
potential compromising influence of another writer on the
great man’s work?

“We have stuck very faithfully to the historical events
from which Camus drew,” says Horrigan, “and we went
back to the original French version of the play before producing
several different drafts of our version. We have
reorganised the end slightly to draw parallels between the
only fictional character in the play and the character of
Dora, who makes the bombs. But we think that people
who know the play will see that we’ve respected Camus’
political views and his love of theatre.”