Albert Camus’ novel La Peste was published in 1947 and instantly seized on as an allegory of the Nazi occupation. Now, Neil Bartlett has adapted and directed it with great ingenuity, expanding the novel’s technique of multiple narration. It is a compelling 90-minute experience but one that leaves us to confront the central dilemma: what, if you take the story out of its historical context, does it mean to us today?
Camus set his story in the Algerian coastal town of Oran. Bartlett’s version takes place in an unspecified locale and begins with a public enquiry into a disaster that has overtaken a perfectly average city where life is both “frenetic and vacant”. Dr Rieux then takes up the story to offer eyewitness accounts of what happened over one particular spring and summer. It starts with the discovery of a dead rat on a landing. Gradually, the city is infested with rats, people die in vast numbers and, although the medical authorities are in denial, a plague is declared and the city quarantined from the outside world.
It is a chilling fable and, like Camus, Bartlett is fascinated by how people react to a crisis. By focusing on a handful of characters, he shows how behaviour is dictated by practical necessity: Rieux struggles to cope with the death toll, a man-about-town like Tarrou and even the journalist, Rambert, join voluntary health teams and a civil servant, Grand, neglects his private obsessions for the public good. Nothing is done to mitigate the horror as in one scene which, through sound alone, evokes the painful death of an eight-year-old boy used as a guinea pig for a new serum. But Bartlett’s version underlines Camus’ point that, even in times of plague, “There is more to admire about people than to despise or despair of”.
Theatrically, it is highly effective: in particular, the use of five chairs and two tables to create a sense of a community thrown into disarray. I was also struck by how the fable, while having its roots in wartime France with its images of collaboration and resistance, seems to look both backwards and forwards: it echoes Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in its image of civic obduracy while anticipating Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in its portrait of social conformity. In the end, Bartlett leaves it to us to deduce our own meaning. I took it to be an assertion of the deep-rooted decency that will enable us to overcome the rage and xenophobia that seem to currently plague European society.
A fine job is done by the five actors: Sara Powell, who unselfconsciously takes on the male role of Dr Rieux, Martin Turner as the worldly Tarrou, Burt Caesar as the unheroic Grand, Joseph Alessi as the profiteering Cottard and Billy Postlethwaite as the love-stricken journalist, Rambert. I don’t think one can entirely ignore the work’s origins, but it here becomes a modern myth about the importance, in times of crisis, for what the historian Tony Judt called “a necessary optimism”.
- At Arcola, London, until 6 May. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
