Post by Steve on Sept 16, 2018 12:18:37 GMT
Saw this last night, and loved it! Camus' impossible-to-dramatise existentialist novel, about a man who doesn't cry at his mum's funeral, becomes a compelling Kafkaesque play in Ben Okri's adaptation, with an unforgettable, beguiling and enigmatic central turn by Sam Frenchum, as the man who doesn't give a sh*t.
Some spoilers follow. . .
Everything is about the central turn in this play, as Meursault, Camus' protagonist, is singularly unemotional about the sort of things that make normal people feel emotional. Things like family bereavements, personal relationships, and criminal behaviour. The entire plot derives from his unemotional character.
In psychobabble, he's a sociopath, but the book, and thankfully the play, is way bigger than that sort of reductionism. The deep question is whether he knows more, or less, about life than the rest of us, and this play runs deep.
Thankfully, Camus' daughter refused Ben Okri permission to change key aspects of the plot, denying his interest giving an Arab character a politically correct makeover, for instance. Had he been allowed to do that, the play would have lost it's mythic quality, it's universal resonance.
What Okri settles on, in dramatising this first-person novel, is to keep much of Meurseult's story as monologue, while all other characters are dramatised. This is a perfect structure for the play, as it retains Meursault's voice, and having him be the only character to directly address us, the audience, mirrors the narrative, which depicts the character as a stranger to the rest of humanity.
Sam Frenchum, who plays Meursault, has form in treating his dead mother like crap, as in Joe Orton's "Loot," at the Park Theatre, he callously dragged her dead body out of her coffin to replace it with cash. In this play, Frenchum again is presented with his mother's body in a coffin, but this time he can't even be bothered to look at her, and prefers to smoke a cigarette and drink a cup of coffee.
What makes Frenchum's performance so compelling and remarkable, and it is, is that he never succumbs to a blank sociopathic monotonal reading of the character, yet nonetheless he nails the strangeness of the character, by avoiding natural reactions to events. If I were to describe what Frenchum is like, in this, I'd say he's like a refined ex-public schoolboy, who went to war, and suffered PTSD. He has culture and refinement and feeling, but it is muted, vacant and inappropriate. Inappropriate in that, while he evinces normal facial ticks, such as smiling or becoming angry, these emotions surface in odd places at odd times. And because Frenchum's Meursault is so modulated, when he does get angry, it is truly electric. Simply put, Frenchum creates a Meursault that gives flesh to Camus in a way that humanises him, makes the book specific and real, yet retains the mysterious and haunting power of the book.
If there is a flaw to this play, it is the fact that such a book even became a play, full of thoughts rather than actions, saying not doing. But that is what the character is like, that is what the story is like, and it's a stunningly successful play regardless, like a unique beer, refreshing the parts other plays cannot reach.
4 and a half stars. 
