With Caligula Guy Cassiers continues his quest for the power figure and the ruler. Albert Camus (1913-1960) completed his drama about cruelty under the Roman emperors just before the Second World War, but it was not performed until after the war. Partly because of wartime events, the play was not unjustly interpreted as an indictment of dictatorship and the abuse of power. 

But Camus’ Caligula is also a drama about the devastating existential confrontation with death. Caligula is unable to come to terms with the death of his sister and mistress Drusilla. He is thrown into a state of utter desolation and despair by the realization of the finiteness of life. He rejects the absurdity of life and the relativity of happiness. 

He sets off in search of the absolute, which manifests itself in his desire to hold the moon in his hands. His surroundings, his friends, the senators are ‘relativists’ in the literal sense of the word: they live and survive, more or less happily, with their illusions, their lies and their compromises. Caligula wants to expose those lies and make everyone recognize the naked truth: the abyss of absolute freedom beyond good and evil. This drives him to shocking atrocities and the random exercise of power. He experiments with the life and death of people around him because he can and has the power to do so. Scenes of unprecedented abuse of power and humiliating brutality alternate with intimate philosophical dialogues in which Caligula endeavours to fathom the meaning of life.