ALBERT Camus’ famous novella, “L’Étranger” (“The Stranger”, also translated as “The Outsider”) was once ranked by “Le Monde” as number one on its list of “100 Books of the Century”.

Famous for introducing the anti-hero Meursault, who faces the guillotine and public hatred because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, the novel has long been a byword for the feelings of disaffection and alienation experienced by Europeans in the post-World War II era. Camus’ 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature citation praised him for illuminating “the problems of the human conscience in our times”.

Now, one of Canberra’s most notable actors, Irish-born Christopher Samuel Carroll, has adapted the work under the title “The Stranger”, for his sixth solo show here, in which he shows us the anti-hero “stripped back, close-up and laid bare”. 

In keeping with the exigencies of the covid-era, he’s directing it himself under the aegis of the Bare Witness Theatre Company in an austere style, performing it in the Ralph Wilson Theatre with 12 chairs upstage, possibly suggesting the 12 jurors at Meursault’s trial or the old folks at his mother’s nursing home. That way, if a lockdown is in place, he can quickly shelve it for a later date.

Carroll, who won the inaugural Helen Tsongas award for acting in 2019, was trained in classical theatre in Dublin, but then went on to train at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, so he speaks some French, but in fact he’s based his play on the 1989 translation by American Matthew Ward, which picks up on the curiously Hemingwayesque style of the novella.

Beginning on the day that his hero’s mother died, he will trace the days following that – Meursault’s dalliance with his girlfriend Marie, his encounters with his neighbour and then the scene where he shoots an unnamed Arab on a lonely beach in Algeria, followed by his trial.

Often considered to be the masterwork of 20th century alienation and absurdism, there’s also a nod to the pointlessness of French colonialism in North Africa.

“L’Étranger” is a challenge to any actor who must make the audience empathise with his uncompromising hero, seen by Carroll as an “everyman” and a “philosophical riddle”, who refuses to hide his feelings from society.

A relative newcomer to Australia, Carroll is surprised to learn of the parallels with the case of Lindy Chamberlain, condemned at large because of her non-empathetic responses at her trial, showing that nothing much has changed since 1942 when the book was written.

Carroll was attracted by the terse language and the challenges of turning this into a piece of theatre while at the same time creating “the experience of reading a novel”.

“In contrast to most of my solo shows, this is not a physical, action-packed piece of theatre, it’s more about bringing this great text into the space – it feels like a cigarette smouldering,” he says.

“There’s such an atmospheric space around the words and there’s plenty of room to dissect and to divide into this character – an honest man, quite a reliable narrator, but a complex character.” 

Favourite scenes are Camus’ description of the Sunday following the mother’s funeral, where he watches people go by, observing them while processing his grief.

Another is the lonely North African beach scene where the sun beats down mercilessly, more evidence of his hero’s dislocation from the alien world he lives in. 

Carroll has chosen the title “The Stranger,” but in French “L’Étranger” can carry the meaning of a foreigner or an outsider, and without doubt Camus was reflecting his own identity as a French-Algerian who always felt himself an outsider, both in Algeria and in Paris among Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s set of intellectuals. 

“He’s holding that mirror up to nature that shows a rift between people in their own country,” Carroll says. 

“As a work of art it’s about this great character and it surely jolts your perspective, in a dance of hypocrisy.”

“The Stranger,” The Ralph Wilson Theatre, Gorman Arts Centre, September 29-October 2. Book via events.humanitix.com