CROSS PURPOSES King’s Head Theatre

Albert Camus’s play is French existentialism at its nihilistic worst and it failed when it premiered in Paris in 1944; not surprising, given its grim contents and the strange way the characters talked. Audiences during the Nazi Occupation would, no doubt, have preferred something less heavy-going. A son returns home, after a 20-year absence, wanting to atone for his neglect. He decides to conceal his identity from his mother and sister, who run a hotel and regularly murder their rich guests, robbing them of their cash and dumping their bodies in the river. It’s not difficult to guess what happens next. The role of the cold-hearted sister was created by Maria Casaris, who played Death in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. Jamie Birkett, a striking ghostly-white and sinister presence, is very impressive; but Camus expresses the sister’s lack of feeling in such absurd and extreme terms that the dialogue (though never Birkett) constantly invites laughter in the wrong places.