Please note that Albert Camus' The Outsider may be listed as The Stranger, or by its original French title, L’Étranger.
"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” The opening of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Etranger is one of the most instantly recognisable in modern European fiction. Ben Okri’s adaptation begins with the same lines and holds faithfully to Camus’s voice and vision, lifting swathes of the novel almost untouched.
Okri seems to refrain from adding a contemporary political edge, perhaps to honour the original while leaving its colonial sensibility open for modern audiences to pick up. The downside is that it feels like an abridged version, rather than an adaptation with its own distinct vision.
Sam Frenchum plays Meursault, a French Algerian living in Algiers, dressed as the consummate Frenchman, in a three-piece suit. Frenchum has an entertaining, dead-eyed ennui as he recounts his murder of an Arab, his trial, his lack of remorse and his existential philosophy. The Arab he kills appears on the side of the stage in the second part but is not a haunting presence, merely a distantly looming generic figure, forever designated to otherness.
To read the full review of the play, chick HERE.
Source The Guardian
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