By PABLO PETRAVICIUS VIEIRA*
Considerations on the play The Stranger
The piece The foreigner, based on the acclaimed text by Albert Camus, gains new life under the direction of Vera Holtz and through the performance of Guilherme Leme Garcia. The story follows the misadventures of Meursault, an ordinary and unpretentious man, who travels to his mother's funeral. The next day, he becomes involved in a sensual passion with a former co-worker. He testifies in favor of a friend accused of domestic violence, just because he had asked him for a favor and, by chance, murders an Arab on the beach. Tried and sentenced to death, Meursault faces a tragic fate.
When the show begins, the stage is almost empty: a bench and a man lying in the half-light, who stands up and utters the famous opening line: “Today, my mother died. Maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” The announcement of the death is received by a note. The bench, simple and multifunctional, serves as a flexible scenic element, while the dark stage, with black cloths in the background, places us at the initial and ambiguous point of the performance and of life, however absurd, and invites us to mentally reconstruct the scenes. We encounter the play in this way: the sets on which the days would pass without crisis have collapsed in order to perpetuate the monotony of Meursault’s days, but enriched by the colors that reach us through the actor’s gestures and descriptions.
The play is composed of a single actor who assumes the roles of character and narrator, approaching the audience, his target, intensely and ready to capture the hearts and consciences of the spectators, who, sitting in the shadows, become witnesses to Meursault's fate. To some extent, he represents the fate of everyone. Although the character describes the events and his feelings (reduced to his physical sensations), and the dialogues of the other characters are presented through the single actor, it is to the audience that he confesses. He establishes a complicity with the audience, with the hidden spectator of the facts, who hides behind the imaginary lines of the text or the blurred silhouettes of the stands. Sometimes, he addresses them directly.
Guilherme's costume, a sober-toned jumpsuit, complements the minimalist proposal of the set. It highlights the actor's face, making it mesmerizing and allowing the audience to believe, for a moment, that Meursault's escape from the death sentence was successful and that we are faced with him on this hidden stage where he presents us with the testimony of his affair with life. The jumpsuit is capable of articulating the diffuse perception between the ordinary worker, the prisoner and the actor's job. The actor knew how to exalt the acidity of such profound modesty that the indifference of someone who no longer finds any value beyond the life that his eyes attest can reach. In this way, Meursault becomes a body, materialized in the actor, and his forces, both of seduction and destruction, like any other body in the world. The objectivity with which the scene is imposed and how the text is narrated is such that it is capable of expressing sarcasm without, in doing so, being intentionally sarcastic. The ephemeral is highlighted in everyday life, where it appears to be the most solid, sometimes eternal. The foreigner resonates in an active intellectual starvation that shines through the haunting speech uttered by the character, with the prophetic tone of someone who finds himself clinging to an unpleasant truth: “we get used to everything.”
If reading the play can be disconcerting, watching the performance is an overwhelming experience that completes and enriches the original text. The play reveals the need for staging, which amplifies the life-giving power of the literary work. The drama of the character Meursault highlights his longing to have a body, a voice and a face. In this regard, Guilherme's staging is so vivid and convincing that, spectacularly, it seems to be the hidden face of the taciturn hero. His harsh and powerful tone of voice, accompanied by slightly nasal diction, echoes the character's sharp modesty, propagating in the academic echoes of the theater the actor-character's inadequacy in the face of life's demands.
It is possible to perceive in this actor’s voice the confluence mentioned by Albert Camus, according to which the voice “is as much of the soul as of the body”. It inspires the truth for which the sound waves that animate it are essential, especially the undeniable fact of the astonishment of the hesitant consciousness in the face of the forces that override the fragmented identity of this stranger on earth, this exile from the world, this stateless man who finds his expression in the body of this actor.
Although the show took place in winter, the dark theater is stifled by the solar heat propagating from the stage. We are overwhelmed by the very heat that follows the exhausting Meursault throughout the plot. One can feel the refreshing sensation of a dip in the Algerian sea. The scenes call for the invasion of landscapes and sensations, reflecting the way Meursault experiences life, emptied of its subjective content: through bodily sensations. Albert Camus contrasts the blissful life perceived on the skin with the roar of a bullet, subverting the balance of a happy day at the beach, intervening the historical madness of men in nature. How many times has man not known how to repeat his condemnation?
The foreigner by Albert Camus is established in this strange experience of the awareness that life goes on despite all the desire for justice and correction of reality on the part of serious men. It is the feeling that we do not belong to the home that should be the most familiar to us, ultimately, to the self. This ambiguity within identity explores the detachment from reality and the fragmented subjectivity of the exile. It highlights the intriguing sensation in which the absurd, Albert Camus's great theme, is embodied, the disproportionate relationship between human need and the senseless world that surrounds it, like realities that fight to overcome an artificial agreement. Meursault, in turn, throws himself into complete abandonment, into the natural encounter with his being, immersed and governed by the strong sensations of nature.
There is therefore a search for an encounter, a touch, a dip in the sea, a sincere lip, a kiss from Marie – who, although ghostly and warm in the imagination, is not present on the scene. However, the excess of sun on Meursault’s head makes “everything waver”. A chance encounter with an Arab who challenges him, combined with the intensity of the sun, causes a salty tear of sweat to burn his eyes, symbolizing blindness and death. He has just murdered an anonymous Arab.
Then comes an absurd trial that scrutinizes Meursault’s banalities and pettiness, that is, every aspect of his life. This trivial perception is used to justify his crime and his punishment, revealing the cognitive and moral insensitivity that permeates his existence. Sentenced to death, we spend a few days – or rather, a few minutes – with Meursault in prison, witnessing his confrontational revolt against the priest who tormented him with promises of eternal salvation.
Meursault is revolted against human illusions and, at the same time, immersed in a deeply embodied understanding of himself and situated in the extreme brevity of his time. What goes on in the last second of the mind of a man condemned to death, awaiting the guillotine? In the end, for Meursault, it makes no difference whether he lives forever or dies in ten or twenty years; it is all the same thing. He has gone too far in his psychic emptiness. Is there any guilt in that? He is alive, conscious, clinging to the scorched earth from which he cannot free himself.
However, he is guilty not only of the crime, but of everything: of having placed his mother in a nursing home, of having shown insensitivity at the funeral, and of having been an accomplice, even if only for convenience, in the conjugal violence of his friend. He is guilty of everything, and that is why he is sentenced to death. He is guilty of not having thought of anything else since the day his mother, although less guilty, served the sentence indicated in the note. But if there is a culprit, it is the sun that hit him full in the face, the shining image of the enemy's knife, the clenching of his fingers on the revolver. The excess of sun and the encounter with the Arab culminate in an absurd trial that examines the banality of his life as true conditions for his crime.
In prison, Meursault, before the priest, opposes God to be an inveterate ally of his time, unnerving the present and all the sensations that hit him in the face and says that if he could choose another life, he would like to have one that could remind him of the one he currently lives.
The play reaches the point of ridiculous monotony. However, it succeeds in creating the heated feelings that surround Meursault. It makes us feel Marie's curves and caresses, the synergy with the waves of the sea, and we see, at all times, the landscapes of Algeria, where the events take place. The play is performed in winter, in a predominantly dark theater, and still places us in the imagination of a heavy, illuminated and stuffy air.
This feeling of being in Meursault's head, pertinent to the work and the function of the only character/narrator, also invades us, bothers us, shows how we fall asleep in the face of so many customs and illusions that, if we could truly see ourselves, we would be distressed and if we could feel the dissonance between reality and our expectations, this disproportion of the absurd, we would observe how these ideas can collapse the scenarios of our thoughts.
The indifference imposed even in the darkened setting is knowing that there is no basis of truth in serious matters and what matters is the feeling that distance and solitude bring us closer to a strange certainty in nature. It is absurd to let oneself be carried away by the rhythms of nature and its sensations. The naturalness with which indifference is carried out is disproportionate, however, it is cunning because it skims and deep, in the depths of a light, because it restores its balance, because it fills its empty being with the mists of the sea, however, without yet knowing what such wandering will provide.
The play stands out for exploring the disconnection from the rational senses of reality, emphasizing a natural sense that superimposes mortality over eternal life. Although the show is disturbed by the interconnection between the metaphysical and the physical, this connection becomes clear in rare moments, as the play allows us to feel the absurdity in the mundane and, at times, empty moments of thought. This sense of the absurdity of existence in the banal is intensely highlighted by Guilherme's performance.
When Meursault rebels against the priest, the simplicity of the character, accentuated by the actor’s gestures, who raises his eyes to the back of the theater towards the beam of light that illuminates him, reminds us of the Cynic philosopher Diogenes responding to Alexander the Great: “I wish nothing from you, only that you get out of my way, for you are casting a shadow over me.” In other words, Meursault reveals, in flesh, blood and voice, the anguish of feeling like a stranger in the world, except for the presence of the body that accompanies him and displaces him from the needs that resonate in subjectivity. The exuberant power of nature is visibly reflected in the actor’s face.
The dispute between Meursault and the priest is marked by visceral intensity. With a single beam of light, the play reveals to us, through the prison bars, the sky that Meursault was observing. The scene evokes the lyrics of Caetano Veloso: “When I was imprisoned / In a jail cell / It was then that I saw for the first time / Those photographs / In which you appear whole / But there you were not naked / But covered in clouds / Earth / Earth / However distant / The wandering navigator / Who would ever forget you?”.
Albert Camus's work never ceases to manifest this freedom that is not entirely dissociated from necessity. In Camus, freedom is not detached from the desire to find a meaning in order to continue living; on the contrary, it challenges the existential correlate of its demanded object. The need for meaning does not imply the necessary existence of meaning. Human existence is the form of a thought that insistently places itself in displacement, disconnected from the causal relations required by thought.
In this way, the universal and abstract characteristic of nostalgia is preserved, but its possibility is not understood, at least according to the demands of reasoning in its strictly logical sense, but debased by an aesthetic that intersects with nature. It is an understanding of life that transcends the categories of intellectual reasoning itself, embracing an identity that includes the environment, nature, external and inhuman, which does not respond to the pleas of a desperate person.
In this context, the body of the actor-character acquires a significant ontological position in the play, illustrating the drama of human destiny and offering a concrete experience of time and presence, enlivened by a solar luminosity in the imagination. The vitality of the character and the work are fused with that of the sun.
In the end, the show leaves a deep impression: the actor's success in meeting the challenge proposed by the director, Guilherme's performance creates an ambiguous synthesis of the work, the author and the actor's craft. The result is a powerful and intimate performance that reflects the literary-philosophical image of Albert Camus and the vitality of the theater, which was his passion.
*Pablo Petravicius Vieira is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Unifesp
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