Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Two Plays

Two Plays

Albert Camus’s play, The Possessed, is a posthumous publication. As such, it is bound to be of interest to those many readers who admired this great French writer and grieved at his early death. But those who look for the harsh lucidity of The Plague or The Myth of Sisyphus are likely to be disappointed. The play lacks the extraordinary light of intellectual compassion which permeates the novel of Dostoyevsky’s from which it is freely adapted, and in a very different way, Camus’s own original writings. Camus falls between two stools. He grafts existential theory and the violences of the French Resistance Movement upon Dostoyevsky’s martyrdom of nihilism. As a result the characters are like dough imperfectly shaped, limbo characters whose rage and despair and endless rationalisations seem curiously trivial. One would have to see a full stage production, however, to be sure of this.

The Blacks is a play about racialism, written for an all-Negro cast. In the irrational force of its rhetoric it comes close to the incantatory language of Haitian Voodoo rites; and the climax to which the play moves, a highly stylised, ritual murder of a white woman by a Negro man, possessed similar undertones. There is no doubt that M. Genet has understood and transcribed many of the subconscious tensions of a Negro community dominated by Europeans. Yet he has an axe to grind; the familiar axe of the intellectual who, disliking his own culture, idealises a more primitive one. I doubt if M.page 444 Genet’s Africa could be intelligible to a Negro Congo politician. But the play looks as if it would do well on the stage. The translation from the French original by Bernard Frechtman is obviously a thoroughly competent one.

1961 (235)