Stanford Report, November 3, 2004

Drama professor dismembers Caligula

BY BARBARA PALMER

L.A. Cicero clark_aposto

French and drama Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès, left, directs actors in a dress rehearsal of Caligula Dismembered, his stripped-down adaptation of Camus' Caligula interwoven with text from Shakespeare's Hamlet and Julius Caesar. The play opens Thursday night at Pigott Theater.

Albert Camus' 1938 play Caligula, about the despotic first-century Roman emperor, has fascinated Jean-Marie Apostolidès since he was a 17-year-old theater student in a French conservatory. "I knew it by heart," said Apostolidès, a professor of French and drama. When a new translation by David Greig was published in London in 2003, Apostolidès' first thought was to direct a traditional production of the play.

But as he's gotten older, he's gotten more audacious, the professor said.

The result is Apostolidès' adaptation, Caligula Dismembered, a stripped-down version of Camus' play interwoven with text from Shakespeare's Hamlet and Julius Caesar (and a whisper of Richard III). For the Drama Department production, which opens Thursday evening at Pigott Theater, Apostolidès, the play's director, also disassembled the conventional relationships between the actors, stage and audience. Actors will perform standing almost like statues on a continually revolving platform on the stage, where the audience also will sit, he said. And at a climactic point, the action will move from the stage out into the space generally reserved for the audience. "I wanted to try something totally different," said the director, who calls the performance a kind of "Dadaist collage." Apostolidès' 20-year-old son, Pierre, composed an original score for the work.

Apostolidès said he noticed the parallels between Camus' characterization of Caligula and Shakespeare's Hamlet while working on an adaptation that would "squeeze the play to its bare bones," much like the work by avant-garde German playwright Heiner Müller. Caligula and Hamlet were both young men linked to power at times when "the world was turning on its hinges," he said. Caligula was confronting the emergence of Christianity; Hamlet was caught between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The characters are like two sides of the same coin: "Caligula reacts to events in a burst of mania—Hamlet is depressive, internalizing the conflicts."

Apostolidès undertook his adaptation "without any scruple of conscience," borrowing material freely from Shakespeare when it would underline connections between Caligula and Hamlet and reinforce his vision, he said.

"I understand that people would object. But it's only a show. Hamlet will survive. Camus and, especially, Shakespeare are strong enough to be torn into pieces." Apostolidès sees the production as a kind of homage to the "intellectual food that nourished me," he said. Besides, it is the prerogative of art to shock, he added. "A university is a place for research. We need to experiment."

Performances are scheduled for Nov. 4-6 and 11-13 at 8 p.m. and on Nov. 6 at 2 p.m. at Pigott Theater in Memorial Auditorium. Because of the unique staging of the play, only 60 seats will be available for each performance. Tickets are $10 for faculty and staff, $8 for students and $12 for general admission. For information or ticket reservations, e-mail Mandy Khoshnevisan at mandana@stanford.edu">mandana@stanford.edu or call 725-5838.