Scenes of daily life between habit and cruelty: Albert Camus’s “Malantendu” directed by Vito Pandolfi

Abstract

Le Malentendu (1943) is Albert Camus’s theatre debut. The main character of the story is Marta. She runs a hotel with his elderly mother in Bohemia. Actually, they are two killers. They use to murder the guests of their hotel to be able to rob them. The macabre ritual is their main daily occupation. One day, they kill Jan, a mysterious customer. Suddenly, there is an unexpectedly coup de théâtre, Jan is Marta’s brother and the two women do not recognize him. This tragic misunderstanding breaks the repetition of the events that have governed their existence.
The aim of this analysis is to investigate the meaning that Camus attributes to everyday life, starting by examining the first production of the play which was directed by Vito Pandolfi (1917-1974) in 1950. Pandolfi stages Marta’s contrasting relationship with daily life and her desire to escape to a utopian place.
Undoubtedly, everyday life achieves a double sense: it is, at the same time, a reassuring element and a coercive entity from which to escape. Camus refers to “the structural essentiality of Greek tragedy” (Davico Bonino 1960, ed. 2000). However, deviating in part from the Aristotelian canons, he prefers common figures to heroes, who seem almost inspired by the bourgeois drama. Which is the role that the concept of the daily routine plays in Camus’s drama? Which are the outcomes forged by a dramatic and scenic point of view?
How does it manifest itself? What is it characterized by? How the desire to escape from everyday life is what drives Martha’s actions?
I will try to answer these questions by identifying the way in which everyday life takes shape on the scene, and, in particular, I will examine what emerges from the directorial choices and the acting of the actors to understand how Marta’s “daily gestures” depict her own existence as well as her mother’s attitude.