The Politics of Plague Theatre: Artaud, Capek and Camus

Abstract

Thus writes Giovanni Boccaccio of the 1348 Florentine plague which sets the stage for the meeting of ten young people who are to tell the multiple stories of The Decameron. Boccaccio’s use of the word ‘spectacle’ intimates that the effects of plague have an inherent theatricality, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by twentieth-century playwrights. Staging plague has political dimensions; such indeed is the case for the theatrical texts under discussion here, in Antonin Artaud’s essay ‘Theatre and the Plague’ (1933) and two anti-fascist plays: the Czech writer Karel Capek’s drama The White Plague (1937) and Albert Camus’s State of Siege (1948). As drawn upon by Artaud, Camus and Capek, plague partakes in a legacy that was already established in Elizabethan plague tracts, which in their turn invoked Biblical references. The theatrical plague legacy survives to resurface again decades after these three playwrights in the AIDS plays that are considered towards the end of this chapter. Such plague texts dramatically confirm Margaret Healy’s assertion that ‘[d]isease and politics are, in fact, inseparable’.²

As for the common people and a large proportion of the bourgeoisie, they presented a much more pathetic spectacle, for the majority of them were constrained, either by their poverty or the hope of survival, to remain in their houses. Being confined to their own parts of the city, they fell ill daily in their thousands, and since they had no one to assist them or attend to their needs, they inevitably perished almost without exception. Many dropped dead in the open streets, both by day and by night, whilst a great many others, though dying in their own houses, drew their neighbours’ attention to the fact more by the smell of their rotting corpses than by any other means. And what with these, and the others who were dying all over the city, bodies were here, there and everywhere.¹

(Italics mine)