
Director Frank Cox-O'Connell has thought about The Just since reading it in theatre school.
THE JUST by Albert Camus, translated by Bobby Theodore, directed by Frank Cox-O'Connell, with Gregory Prest, Raquel Duffy, Peter Fernandes, Katherine Gauthier, Brendan Wall and Diego Matamoros. Presented by Soulpepper at the Young Centre (50 Tank House). Previews begin Saturday (March 5), opens March 10 and runs to March 26; see soulpepper.ca for schedule. $32-$96, rush $5-$25. 416-866-8666.
How far can we go to validate our well-intentioned actions? To improve the lot of humankind, can we justify the deaths of a few?
Those are the kinds of questions that Albert Camus ponders in his 1949 play The Just, in which a group of Russian revolutionaries in 1905 plan to kill a grand duke. Based on actual events, the play focuses on the five terrorists and their qualms about following through on their intention.
"What attracted me to the piece was the discussion of how to remain human in a world increasingly controlled by inhuman forces," says director Frank Cox-O'Connell. "Camus wrote the piece with memories of Nazi-occupied France and his country's past as a colonizing oppressor. All he did was put a historical lens on the idea, using a seed event that looked toward the Russian Revolution."
The play's terrorist cell includes Yanek, a life-loving poet; Dora, a chemist who makes the group's bombs; and the bitter, fierce Stepan.
"These people intend to assassinate a corrupt state official, and the echoes of that are relevant today. The play reads like the front page of a contemporary newspaper, with its issues of terrorism and asymmetric warfare.
"But the play goes beyond the ethics of terrorism and our understanding of resistance, statehood, religion and economics. The deeper question is what does it take to really, in a meaningful way, be concerned with the society in which you live? And if that means sacrificing your idea of caring for individuals, should we go there? Can we go there?"
Cox-O'Connell has pondered the play since he read it over a decade ago at theatre school. A Soulpepper Academy graduate and indie theatre artist who recently played Tesman in Necessary Angel's Hedda Gabler, he's been working on the script for five years with translator Bobby Theodore, with whom he collaborated on the experimental performance piece 300 Tapes.
As they developed it, the director was surprised to find how "incredibly dramatic the script is. Camus the philosopher is rarely given credit for being a good dramatist. The story is full of action and suspense, and couched within it are these thoughts about contemporary warfare. There's nothing didactic about it."
Just as unexpected, perhaps, is that the play's central conflict has to do with love.
"But there are several types of love here, one a reciprocal sharing of passionate feelings and the other concerned for our fellow beings, a love that's more altruistic and aims for a better world. The two are connected: both are born of goodness, and their goals are an integral part of what makes us human, but they're not the same thing.
"Camus pits the two against each other, and the tension keeps building. Sometimes when the rubber meets the road, it's a lot harder to hold on to an abstract belief in justice and easier to hold on to the need to be touched."
The situation becomes more stressful when Yanek, who throws the bomb, confronts the duke's widow.
"The first note that Camus made when writing this play was that it's easy to kill an idea but much harder to kill a man, someone who shaved that morning," says Cox-O'Connell. "The meeting with the duchess forces Yanek to look her in the eye and confront the cost of real change."
The layers of questioning don't stop there for the director and his cast.
"The nature of the audience for this play wasn't lost on Camus in the 40s, nor on us today. The terrorists look a lot like us; they're privileged people who've reached the tipping point and come down from their elegant tea rooms to make the world a better place.
"Then and now, the script plays with where the viewers' sympathies lie."