It takes some time before the banqueting table that the director and designer Jan Lauwers set up in the Burgtheater’s Kasino is actually used for the intended purpose. It is generously provided with unbreakable plates, glasses and cutlery. An electronically underpinned sound system with 45 percussionist’s cymbals makes the whole thing trill and clash alarmingly. Romans loyal to the emperor crowd timorously around this table, while also overlooking the wildest excesses of their imperator (Cornelius Obonya). Albert Camus’ drama Caligula, written before the Second World War, contains a compellingly clear interpretation of totalitarianism. Camus saw the monster on the ruler’s throne not as a pathological bloodsucker, but as a philosopher tormented by melancholy. Obonya’s Caligula does not after all bait and persecute his subjects out of self-interest. No, the young emperor, whose sister (also his beloved) has just died, resists an incontestable law: people die and are not happy. Caligula wants to remedy this situation. He begins by ‘deconstructing the moral’, as we would put it today. By subjecting his subjects to horrors that can in no way be justified, he turns the law of chance to his own advantage in a paradoxical gesture. Blood in the wine glass And so the emperor’s place of work is clearly marked off from the rest of the table: a lectern on a stage; blood sloshes in his wine glass. The anointed one squeezes his way behind the table to bring an end to the grousing and scheming of his courtiers. Caligula wears a sunny, light-coloured suit. He wants to ‘have’ the moon. The trim of his shirt and the lapels of his jacket are decorated with four stars. This emperor, by no means seductive in charm and beauty, lapses sobbing into deep melancholy. His concubine Caesonia (Maria Happel), in a snakeskin print costume, gives him a lot of motherly attention. Jan Lauwers’ stage setting moves elegantly and effectively over a minefield of excessive acting. Just like a drug addict, Caligula needs increasingly high doses of violence to retain his mastery. Paradoxically enough, the courtiers groaning under his yoke appreciate their emperor like a clown who livens up the interval. Patricians who include the lyrical poet Scipio (Hans Petter Dahl) and the grey major domo Lepidus (Falk Rockstroh) can barely conceal their increasing fascination with this monster. But the essential thing is that Roman society appears incapable of intervening. The character of the silent Octavia (Anneke Bonnema), whom Lauwers himself created, is mainly involved in filming the folds of her party dress. In a remote part of the stage lies the stuffed cadaver of a horse. Its coat too is examined down to the finest detail by the camera, live – as if everything organic can only be forced to reveal its secrets with the aid of technical devices. One of the most crass jokes in this outstanding production is that Caligula then penetrates the lady with, of all things, the dead animal’s penis. At the end comes the long-awaited banquet. Instead of wiping that impossible human being Caligula from the face of the earth once and for all, the Romans fill themselves with schnitzels and lettuce leaves. The emperor sits in their midst like the first among equals. Briefly, and then he is completely alone.