The Theater: New Play on Broadway, Feb. 29, 1960

Caligula (adapted from the French of Albert Camus by Justin O'Brien) scrutinizes one of the most nefarious rulers of history, whose one excuse for being a monster is that he was almost surely a madman. Camus wrote Caligula in 1938, an ominous time of madmen and monsters, but even then Caligula was not in any usual sense tendentious. No self-made, power-mad Brown-shirted or Black-shirted or Red dictator, Caligula was bred to the purple; endowed with unlimited power, what he came to thirst after was unlimited "freedom." Camus' Caligula, whose once very human blood has turned to bile, and from bile to...

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