Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Caligula

Caligula. Image, Julia Weber

****

Some productions prove prescient. Like Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre's production of Caligula. Albert Camus’s 1944 play interrogating dictatorship, tyranny and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Premiering after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its subsequent performances are living acts of resistance. Its tale of the infamous Roman emperor whose cruelty and perversion became the stuff of nightmares painfully relevant. Even as director Ivan Uryvskyi never draws direct parallels with Putin, but portrays Caligula as speaking to all dictators. A prescient decision given the current global landscape. Caligula a megalomaniac dictator for whom to govern is to steal. The type who, through warped, self-fulfilling logic, convinces themselves, and their acolytes, that they are saviours, more sinned against than sinning, whose word, deeds, and policies are divine proof of their existence as Gods.

Performed in Ukrainian with English surtitles, Uryvskyi’s adaptation remains grounded in Rome. Caligula, in deep mourning following the death of his sister Drusilla, lashes out in wanton acts of violence. Driven by a deep rooted death wish and a desire for divinity, he wants to raze the world if he can’t have the moon. Power, sex, corruption and death intrinsically woven into a rich visual tapestry. An impressive ensemble of Vitalii Azhnov, Oleksandr Rudynskyi, Tetiana Mikhina, Ludmila Smorodina, Akmal Huriezov and Renat Settarov like vivid cartoon characters in Petro Bogomazov’s magnificently clever set. Illuminated by Bogomazov’s lighting which offers a masterclass in mood. A tall, copper rusted wall reveals a series of doors that open to resemble comic book panels. Snippets of scenes playing out like images in a graphic novel; a Stasi-like acolyte recording conversations, Caligula embroiled in a lustful embrace, men conspiring in a shadowed doorway. The wall later a backdrop against which Caligula’s images prove stronger than its words. Words which feel self-consciously overwrought, their volume and pace frequently making surtitles redundant for being impossible to keep up with. Bogomolov’s visuals, along with Tetiana Ovsiichuk’s costumes and Oleksandr Kryshtal’s music and sound coalesced into visual poetry by superb performances. In which Caligula’s gender fluidity is beautifully conveyed. As is his childlike petulance, his hurt and grief, his hardened tenderness. Against which resistance, devotion, anguish and despair find equal expression. Like most Roman emperors the end is as inevitable as it is predictable. But the final twist is a cautionary image in which, yet again, sight and sound speak stronger than words.

Theatrically, admirers of Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor will find much to enjoy in Caligula. Whose imagery is infused with power, passion and poetry. Not least the final image, which might well prove to be the most harrowing. Reminding us that theatre is strongest when it speaks to truth. Caligula a living testament that when the right to create is suppressed, artistic expression becomes an act of resistance. That others have an obligation to solidarity, and a responsibility to support. As Camus presciently observed in his 1957 essay, The Artist and His Age; “ to create today is to create dangerously…art cannot be a monologue…we suffer together…the world is our common country…”

Caligula by Albert Camus, presented by Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre, Ukraine,  runs at The Samuel Beckett Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2025 until October 11.

For more information visit Dublin Theatre Festival 2025