The Outsider, Print Room at the Coronet review - power in restraint

As the Syrian conflict enters its final convulsions, renewing memories of how the Sykes-Picot agreement – between an Englishman and a Frenchman – would cause more than a century of political resentment in the Arab world, The Outsider seems particularly piquant.

Yet Ben Okri’s beautifully measured adaptation of Camus’s piece of existential provocation – in which a man who doesn’t weep at his mother’s death then shoots an Arab – also derives power from the restraint with which it explores its troubling questions.

We begin on a tone of a dark comedy as Sam Frenchum’s mesmerising Meursault begins to tell us his story, stranded on the dimly lit stage as if he is already in his prison cell. When the infamous lines ‘Mother died today. Or was it yesterday? I can’t be certain,’ resonate through the auditorium, there is a shimmer of uneasy laughter.

The spirit of Magritte – Camus’s Belgian contemporary – pervades this brand of existentialism: characters comically appear and then disappear as if summoned from the void by Meursault’s emotion-stripped imagination. Director Abbey Wright has carefully calibrated the action so that the other cast members bring the props and surroundings to our anti-hero – while he talks chairs, cigarettes, at one point even a phone, emerge as if from thin air.

On one level this is a visual reinforcement of the sandpaper-dry absurdism that filters through Camus’s writing; on a more profound level it builds on the sense that we are witnessing a man for whom the concept of choice is meaningless. Richard Hudson’s stark set design – in which many of the props are spray-painted grey, including Meursault’s mother’s coffin – combines with David Plater’s stunningly hazy lighting to enhance the sense of a world drained of significance. Matt Regan’s perfectly calibrated sound design further heightens the raw, unsettled atmosphere.

The publicity reminds us that this is the first major British theatre production of Camus’ The Outsider, and there are a couple of moments when you can almost see why. Ennui is a tough proposition when you’re seeking to engage an audience for more than two hours, and there are moments when it seems that even an adaptation as alternately deft and lyrical as Okri’s could be trimmed still further.

Yet this is a production more than worth seeing, not least because it announces Frenchum as an actor of extraordinary intelligence and magnetism. Clad in pinstripes, looking at first more like a businessman who’s lost his way to the station than an existential anti-hero, gradually he builds up the layers of intensity, conveying the anguish beneath his detachment. At first his face seems frozen in constant bemusement – there’s something in the lift of the eyebrows, the ironic clench of the cheekbones that communicates that essentially we are watching a mask. As the action progresses though, we start to see the tears threatening – nothing as vulgar as actual emotion, but a hint of much more happening than any (other) outsider can comprehend.

He is well served by the rest of the cast, who make an impact not least because through including a community company, casting director Ruth O’Dowd has created the sense that we have all ages of man – and woman - playing the different roles. David Carlyle puts in a compellingly acerbic turn, first as Meursault’s boss and then his Prosecutor, while Vera Chok’s Marie provides a vivid counterpoint to his wry alienation. 

We live in a post-colonial age in which we are as compelled by the Arab’s story as by Meursault’s – something reflected in recent works, not least Kamel Daoud’s excellent 2013 novel The Meursault Investigation, which re-examines the story from the Algerian victim’s brother’s perspective. Wisely Okri doesn’t address this in the production itself, staying close to Camus' text, but in a beautiful, powerful short film The Insider, narrated by the victim. Audience members are invited to watch this in a small studio either before the play starts or during the interval.

It is highly advisable to spend your time doing this – even with the distractions of the Coronet’s stunningly beautiful bar – not least because it gives additional emotional heft to what we then see of Meursault’s imprisonment and trial. On press night, in the final scenes of the play, the audience was so rapt you could hear an existential pin drop. You leave the theatre feeling that this is a simultaneously stylish and moving exhumation of an enduringly disturbing classic.

• The Outsider at Print Room at The Coronet till 20 Oct
  
• Read more theatre reviews on theartsdesk

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