Though known for his novels that plumb the depths of absurdism, it was the theater stage that Camus called “one of the only places in the world I'm happy." After forming two troupes in his early twenties in Algeria, the prolific author moved to Paris for work, where between 1944-1949 he would go on to stage the four original plays gathered in this collection.

Caligula, his first full-length work for the stage, begins with the infamous Roman emperor in the throes of grief at the death of his sister Drusilla and tugs at the same essential question that haunts so much of Camus’s work: Faced with the nullifying force of time, which snuffs out even our grandest emotions, how does one go on living? And is there a limit to the hardness of the human heart?