The Plague is...
...it's my new show at the Arcola Theatre,
but before it was my new show at the Arcola Theatre
it was first created as a novel by a man called Albert Camus,
who was the Nobel Prize winner for literature.
He wrote it in 1946. An extraordinary year in Europe.
The year after the defeat of Nazism.
In 1942, he'd gone across the Mediterranean
and was in France at the moment when the Nazis invaded.
And he was caught in southern France,
where he became an active member of the resistance.
When the novel was published in 1947,
the novel was a sensation. It was a best-seller.
It's a fantastic story.
The Plague famously starts with – someone finds a dead rat,
and then there's a great moment when someone finds the second rat.
And they don't say to each other,
"Something's going on, isn't it."
I mean – one rat, that's just a dead rat.
But another dead rat in the same place the next day?
There's got to be a reason for that.
Why doesn't someone say, 'for God's sake
this could be a sign of something really bad'?
Why doesn't someone blow the whistle?"
I think that's a very familiar feeling to us all at the moment.
'Why didn't we see this coming?'
'Did we see it coming and did we choose not to do anything about it?'
Camus' whole project is about honesty.
Is about saying, 'how do people actually behave?'
And 'let's not be scared – let's be honest, let's be brave.'
He cuts right to the heart of people's feelings,
and I hope that the consistent feature of my theatre
is its heart;
is a sense of being right there in the room with the actors
and them sharing really powerful feelings with you
and asking you to go into unknown territory with them.
The thing when I reread the novel that I came back to again and again
is just three pages before the end.
One of the the characters – the doctor, the leading character in the story –
says an extraordinary thing.
"When you live through a time of plague, what you discover is that
there is more to admire in your fellow human beings than to despise or to despair of."
And I think that's an utterly extraordinary thing to say.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I want to share it with the audience.
The tickets are fabulously good value.
They're really good value.
