It’s quite a challenge for young director Oriana Cama’s staging of Albert Camus’ Misunderstanding, written in 1943.
At the heart of Camus’ play is the assumption that happiness and prosperity can be secured if one can just kill enough other people different from oneself.
A fairly simple plot serves as the framework around which Camus constructs an existential debate. A son who has been living in an unnamed sun-baked land across the sea comes home to Europe after 22 years to find that his widowed mother and his sister are taking in lodgers and killing them for their money. The mother and sister do not recognize him, so he takes a room incognito.
The question of whether the mother and sister murder the returning prodigal son is almost beside the point. Camus once wrote that the play is ”one of rebellion” against the idea of blind acceptance of fate. As one character states, “In the normal order of things, no one is ever recognized. Neither in life nor death is there any peace or homeland.” In The Misunderstanding, Camus is saying that if one wants to be recognized and account for himself, he must stand up and say who he is.
Camus wrote ”The Misunderstanding” (”Le Malentendu”) in 1943 in occupied Paris, and the carnage of World War II is the immediate point of reference. ”I am sick and tired of Europe,” the sister says. ”It smells of death.” In this decade alone, Camus’s arguments could apply to the Balkans, central Africa and his own native Algeria.
An able cast delivers an intelligent reading of the play, Arb철Jakllari (Jean), Adriana Tolka (Mother), Brikena Sinanaj (Maria), Cubi Metka (Martha), Idriz Gjokaj (Old servant)
