Though largely remembered as a novelist, there was a time when the writer Albert Camus was known more for his plays. The son of a working-class Algerian family, whose father was killed at the Battle of Verdun in 1914 when Albert was a baby, Camus would come of age as a man of the theater: a natural, charismatic leader with interest in material production and all elements of stage production: light, staging, acting, directing. As a playwright, the young Camus was never, in a sense, isolated—despite recurrent bouts of tuberculosis—an endowment of commission from the local Algerian Communist Party (where he was, from first to last, involved in large scale organization and organizations) allowed him to be an active one.
Rehearsals for his work would take place in Algiers at the Actors’ Home or at the Communist Party’s headquarters, to then be performed in the city’s Théâtre du Travails (or “Worker’s Theater”). According to his biographer Todd Olivier, Camus directed by “thunderous decree” micromanaging every aspect of his productions, yelling at tardy actors, and demanding professionalism from his largely amateur casts. From his open and numerous affairs with actresses, Camus acquired a mixed reputation within his own company (the father of one actor would escort his daughter to and from rehearsal to shield her from Camus’s advances). A talented, precocious director capable of filling a house, Camus’s vision was too idiosyncratic for his patrons: the more militant communists in the company found, for instance, that Camus’ adaptation of Gorky’s The Lower Depths was not sufficiently communist in spirit.
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