"There is a certain amount of comfort sitting in a room full of fellow unenlightened people, drawing strength from our shared hypocrisies and self-satisfied guiltlessness. Regrettably, 'Albert Camus' The Fall' demonstrates that one person's existential crisis can be simply a drunken rant to another."
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Belgian actor Ronald Guttman gives a subtle, yet wrenching performance in The Fall, expounding the philosophies of Albert Camus trapped in the sad and now resigned character of the exiled Parisian lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Fellow bar mates, we the audience, are his confessors in a sailors’ dive bar in Amsterdam’s red-light district circa 1956. In adapting Camus’ last completed novel for the stage, Alexis Lloyd, has created a role of controlled emotions that belie the seething honesty struggling to rear its ugly head. Director Didier Flamand encourages the full use of the space to make constant contact with members of the audience. Turning around from ordering his drink at the bar, Guttman is in the best position to orate at will.
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While it can’t be denied that much of this holds intellectual interest—Camus’s literary rival, Jean-Paul Sartre, loved the book—it takes considerable mental endurance to stick with and follow Clamence’s personalized philosophical meanderings while making yourself look perpetually interested, lest Mr. Guttman’s eye fall on you in an off moment while you’re pondering what’s going to be on TV when you get home.
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"The actor’s unhurried delivery, punctuated by sudden outbursts, is like a slow boil—mostly calm but with small eruptions of desperation."
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