Caligula and Three Other Plays

Four provocative masterpieces for the stage by Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Stranger and The Plague, brought together in a vibrant new translation by Ryan Bloom.

Although Camus is best known for his novels exploring absurdism, he considered the theater one of the few places where he was truly happy. From 1944 to 1949, he brought four original plays to the Paris stage, each grappling with questions of freedom, morality, violence, love, and the search for meaning.

In Caligula, a Roman emperor consumed by grief confronts the terrifying implications of a universe without inherent meaning. The Misunderstanding turns the longing for home and the desire to escape into a devastating tale of mistaken identity and murder. The Just examines the moral boundaries of political violence through the story of a revolutionary plot to assassinate a Grand Duke in Moscow. And in State of Emergency, Camus transforms plague into an allegorical character, offering a striking meditation on disease, power, and authoritarianism.

For the first time in English, this edition brings together Camus’s final versions of all four plays, alongside deleted scenes and alternate lines of dialogue. Engaging, unsettling, and made to be performed, these works reveal a vital dimension of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.