Camus’s horror story parallels modern plagues
The Plague Arcola
In the Algerian town of Oran one April, rats start dying in the street. First it’s only a couple and then, within days, thousands. A week later, the first person dies. No one in the town can guess at the scale of the death to follow. Or, as one character puts it in Neil Bartlett’s sucker-punch of a play, “In April, we had no idea.”
Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, on which Bartlett’s 80-minute drama is based, uses a plague outbreak as a metaphor for the spread of fascism across Europe during the Second World War. Reflecting the spirit of detached inquiry that runs throughout the novel, Bartlett deftly stages his version in the form of a verbatim drama, with the five main characters seated behind a table offering personal witness testimonies on what happened in Oran to an unseen inquisitor.
There’s the honourable Dr Rieux, who battles to get the authorities to recognise the enormity of the threat and who, in Sara Powell’s eloquent performance, combines duty with a streak of human despair. There’s a journalist (played with eel-like slipperiness by Billy Postlethwaite, son of the late Pete), who resentfully finds himself trapped after Oran goes into lockdown. There’s Mr Cottard, a petty criminal who makes money smuggling out the desperate.
One doesn’t have to look far to find contemporary parallels, be it the 2014 Ebola outbreak or the rise of the far-Right. Yet the cleverness of Bartlett’s grippingly beautiful staging, with its poetic use of rhythm, lighting and sound, is the way it releases every ounce of suggestive power from Camus’s original while remaining a starkly focused drama. I found myself thinking of the rapid rise of Isis and the refugee crisis. The most harrowing scene, in which Dr Rieux watches a screaming child die in agony, recalls the atrocities in Syria.
In the end, Bartlett’s production can’t help but drive home a thumping message: namely, in the face of the unspeakable, what would you do?
Until May 6. Tickets: 020 7503 1646; arcolatheatre.com