Le Malentendu: Pièce en trois actes / Caligula: Pièce en quatre actes

"a novel which became The Stranger, a philosophical essay, eventually titled The Myth of Sisyphus, and a play, Caligula. These were completed and sent off from Algeria to the Paris publisher in September 1941. Although Camus would have preferred to see them appear together, even in a single volume, the publisher, for both commercial reasons and because of the paper shortage caused by war and occupation, released The Stranger in June 1942 and The Myth of Sisyphus in October. Camus kept working on the play, which finally appeared in book form two years later" (Aronson 2022; see also Lottman, p. 428)

Camus began writing Caligula in 1938, at approximately the same time as the essay and the novel of the same cycle. It was a lifetime work, as he revised and rewrote it throughout the years, "perhaps only premature death prevented the appearance of a final version" (Lottman: 207). Throughout the successive versions, "[...] the Emperor Caligula's deeds and his underlying character and motivation change little, and these are of course the principal features of a play at once intriguing and repelling. One thing is proved by the presence of Caligula at virtually every step of Camus' writing life: its importance to him as a symbol (of absurd man, the absurd world)." (Lottman: 364). Camus considered the title "Le Jouer" ("The player") both for Caligula and his first novel La Mort hereuse (only published posthumously in 1971).

Camus was planning Le Malentendu already in 1941, under the tentative title "Budejovice", the name of a town he had passed through during his journey through Czechoslovakia in 1936 (Lottman: 241); "L'Exilé" was another early title (Lottman: 273). It was, together with La Peste, to represent what he was calling "his second series", a triptych on revolt, but ended up being published together with Caligula and can be counted as part of the first cycle on the absurd. Indeed, its plot is tied to The Stranger: Camus clipped a true crime story reported in Algerian newspapers from January 1935 and saved it for later use, first as an anecdote in the essay and later as the plot for the play (Lottman: 85).

While not thesis plays – plays which develop or defend a particular thesis – both works represented a "theater of the impossible", according to Lottman, Camus wrote: "Thanks to an impossible situation (Le Malentendu) or character (Caligula), they try to give life to apparently insoluble conflicts through which all thought must pass before producing the only valid solutions. This theater suggests, for example, that each of us bears in himself his part of illusion and misunderstanding which is destined to be killed..." (Lottman: 313).

After WWII, Albert Camus (1913-1960) became, as a novelist and playwright, moralist and political theorist, "the spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the next, not only in France but also in Europe and eventually the world" (Cruickshank 2026).


Sources and further reading:

Aronson, Ronald. (Winter 2022 Edition). Albert Camus. In Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/camus/

Britannica Editors (2026, July 15). Theatre of the Absurd. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Theatre-of-the-Absurd

Cruickshank, J. (2026, July 31). Albert Camus. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Camus

Lottman, H. R. (1979). Albert Camus: A biography. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Todd, O. (1998). Albert Camus: A life (B. Ivry, Trans.). Vintage.