Caligula

The Dunster House Drama Workshop has anticipated my feeling (more precisely, my lack of feeling) about Caligula; they quote in their program an excerpt from Camus' preface to the play, "...I look in vain for philosophy in these four acts." I look in vain for drama. Camus wrote Caligula in 1938, when he was twenty-five years old; and what interested him were the implications of dictatorship. It is to his eternal credit that he gave his villain all the best lines, all the most telling arguments. Desire for absolute power may be a form of madness, but to turn Caligula into a raving maniac would have been to build a straw man and knock him down with a bulldozer.

On the other hand, Caligula's argument, that "one is always free at the expense of others," is so convincingly developed that the play cannot prove it wrong. Camus helps defeat his own cause by denying his exponents of humanism the articulate passion that he grants Caligula. Scipio and Cherea, the spokesmen for humanism, are a pair of pale weaklings compared to the mighty Caligula, who destroys what dramatic effectiveness they might have had by pitying them, by understanding them.

Dunster House had two directors for this production, Gaynor Bradish and John Asher, which fact may account for its heterogeneity. They gave up one of the best possibilities of the play, that of delighting the eye with a great Roman spectacle, by giving it in modern dress. Weli, not quite modern dress. Men wore tuxedoes and lit their cigarettes with Zippo lighters, careful not to burn their Edwardian sideburns. Caesonia (Caligula's mistress) appeared in several very Roman costumes, one modern evening gown, and one outfit that would not have been out of place in the chorus line of the Copacabana. Asa Gates designed those costumes which were not rented from a tuxedo agency. There is no set designer listed on the program, which may acount for the sets.

The minor actors, from Caligula's clean-cut ROTC army to Scipio (a sweet young poet who wears a turtle neck sweater and an Italian zoot-suit), were mild, unprepossessing, and without talent. But from the gray haze of the production emerge the performances of Lynn Milgrim and David Gullette as Caesonia and Caligula. Miss Milgrim's asset is her presence, her ability to command the stage. She is a marble statue on a stage of mannequins.

Gullette's performance was uneven, his best moments coming in the soliloquies, in which he contemplates each of his bloody acts. But it is not his isolated moments of passion that I want to praise; rather it is the intelligence with which his role is conceived. The tension of the production is created by Caligula's slowly developing insanity. This production convinces us that Caligula's decision to feign madness is rationally made, and that the insanity becomes real as he finds only a flimsy and cowardly opposition to his craving after power. Gullette's final frenzied soliloquy after strangling Caesonia, in which he decides that absolute power brings absolute loneliness, that he has been wrong, is as moving as an actor can make it. Somewhere behind the rough edges of Gullete's performance there lurks a diamond.

Kenneth Tynan called Caligula a "great bad play," which ranks it far above most of its contemporaries. Camus was on the side of the angels; so are Gullette and Milgrim; and so, therefore, is the Dunster House production.