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▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: the essentials - a well-known play; the opening, key scenes and ending were read closely and the rest by sampling.
Core ideas
The play opens on a court in disarray: the young emperor Caligula has vanished for three days after the death of his sister and lover Drusilla. The patricians assume a passing grief, "for one woman lost, ten can be found". When he returns, dishevelled, he tells his freedman Helicon that he went looking for the moon. Drusilla's death has revealed to him a simple, heavy truth: "men die and they are not happy". The world as it is has become unbearable to him, so he wants the impossible, "the moon, or happiness, or immortality". Having the power, he decides to be logical to the end and to teach the empire this truth. He orders the patricians to disinherit their children in favour of the state, to be executed in an arbitrary order since "these executions all have the same importance". He declares to Caesonia that his freedom is now "boundless" and that he will give his century "the gift of equivalence".
The middle acts show this pedagogy of the absurd turning into tyranny and theatre. Caligula humiliates the patricians, takes Mucius's wife at table, invents crimes by syllogism and opens a public brothel. He dresses as Venus to be worshipped, explaining to young Scipio, whose father he killed, that the only way to equal the gods is to be "as cruel as they are". Against him stands Cherea, who joins the patricians' conspiracy not out of ambition but out of a "reasonable fear" of "this inhuman lyricism" and a wish to live in a coherent world. In the scene of the tablet, Caligula is given proof of the plot. He melts the wax tablet in a torch flame in front of Cherea, restoring his "innocence" as only an emperor can, and concedes that a man who wants simply to live and be happy is in his own way right. Scipio, the poet, remains torn between hatred of Caligula and the recognition that the emperor taught him "to demand everything". A contest of poets on death and the theatrical cruelty of Helicon's sideshow carry the play towards its close.
In the final act Caligula, now almost alone, kills Caesonia, the "last witness" whose ageing love he cannot bear. To love someone, he says, is to accept growing old with them, and he is incapable of that love. He calls his state a "demented", sterile happiness, the joy of unpunished murder that crushes lives to reach eternal solitude. Before the mirror he admits his failure: he "did not take the right path", his freedom "is not the right kind", and nothing in this world or the next matches his thirst. Helicon is stabbed as the conspirators enter, and Caligula, struck down, cries out his last words, "I am still alive". Camus's tragedy of logic pushed to its extreme thus becomes a reflection on the limits of a revolt that denies others.
Excerpts
Caligula to Helicon on the truth that makes the moon necessary:
“This world as it is is unbearable, so I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, something crazy, perhaps, as long as it's not of this world. Your reasoning follows. It's a pity that one usually can't carry it through to the end. It is precisely because one doesn't usually carry it through that the result is negative.”
Cherea on why he joins the conspiracy:
“But I repeat, let this also be clear: I am with you only for the moment. Afterward, I will serve none of your interests. I am determined to find my peace again in a world that has returned to coherence. I do not act out of ambition, but out of a reasonable fear. The fear of this inhuman lyricism”
Caligula before the mirror, at the end:
“I reached out my hands, I reach out my hands and meet only you, always you, face to face, you Caligula, for whom I am filled with hatred. I did not take the right path, the one that needed to be taken, and it leads to nothing. My freedom is not the right kind.”